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eSATA External Storage Drive Reviewed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the happy-marriages-of-technology dept.

Tom's Hardware has a practical look at an eSATA drive offering from Taiwanese storage firm Thecus. From the article: "Thecus' N2050 is one of the first external twin-drive RAID boxes that uses eSATA. As expected, its performance was far better than what USB 2.0 offers. The end result is impressive. The date transfer rate of 30 MB/s that USB 2.0 offers does indeed pale in comparison to 100 MB/s for eSATA, while the WD1500 drives are capable of delivering even better performance in RAID 0. It is also good to see that Thecus did not throw the USB 2.0 interface away, because it is a nice backup interface whenyou want to use the device with other computers via USB 2.0."

7 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Meant for whom? by Jordan+Catalano · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "Most users do one of two things when their PC runs out of hard disk space: they either add an additional drive or rely on external storage with a USB 2.0 or Firewire connection. However, both options have their disadvantages, since installing a new drive can be a cumbersome process, while external hard drives do not offer the same level of performance as that of directly attached Serial ATA (SATA) or UltraATA."

    And why does the type of home user who shuns opening his or her case need mind-blowing performance? I just don't see who this product is for. There are already sollutions available for those concerned with either performance or ease-of-install.

    1. re: Meant for whom? by lax-goalie · · Score: 3, Insightful

      And why does the type of home user who shuns opening his or her case need mind-blowing performance?

      And why do you assume that an user who requires an external drive is a "home user who shuns opening his or her case"? Poppycock.

      Scenario 1: All the drive bays in your machine are full, and Firewire's too slow because you move big files around.

      Scenario 2: The data on the drive needs to go somewhere else.

      My desktop drive bays are full, but for me, I see this as a great replacement for backup tape drives, w/o having to sacrifice throughput. Assuming that the enclosure will fit in a safety deposit box, a couple of these could replace my current network backup hardware.

    2. Re:Meant for whom? by drsmithy · · Score: 2, Insightful
      And why does the type of home user who shuns opening his or her case need mind-blowing performance?

      I don't shun opening my case, however, with 18 drives in it already it's physically incapable of holding any more - and I still have three 100Mhz, 64-bit PCI-X slots free.

      More importantly, I'd prefer to pay $hundreds for some small, quiet, multi-drive eSATA enclosure than $thousands for a huge, noisy server chassis capable of holding more drives requiring the inconvenience and risk of relocating the internals of an entire machine.

    3. Re:Meant for whom? by Solder+Fumes · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Just because it's easy and portable doesn't make it for the non-techs only.

      In fact, that's what makes tech cheaper for us...it's the rest of the non-techs buying a new computer whenever theirs is "broken" from too much spyware, or needs a little more RAM. If everyone bought PC hardware only when needed and jealously guarded every CPU cycle, PCs would still be as expensive as they were 20 years ago.

  2. Why do reviewer's speculate? by daivzhavue · · Score: 2, Insightful
    From pg 5
    It is interesting to note that Thecus uses a PCI Express slot to connect the drive cage to the controller PCB. If the device will one day become an NAS system , all Thecus has to do is exchange the controller board with the NAS version, which carries a network port instead of the eSATA connector.
    Or MAYBE... they just used an off the shelf part to connect two boards together because the parts were cheap and didn't require any new fabrication. I have a docking station that uses an "AGP Slot" to connect two PCI slots plus some misc connections at a right angle to the main board. Do I think I can add remove the PCI Slots and actually install an AGP video card? C'mon people. Quit talking about things you have no idea about. Its articles like this that remind me why I don't read Tom's.
    --
    "A REAL computer has ONE speed and the only powersaving it permits is when you pull the power leads out of the back!"
  3. Re:Is it reliable? by Dolda2000 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    You're extremely unlikely to get any 3x speed improvement anyway. Sure, S-ATA may be able to sustain a much larger bandwidth than USB2 (although even then, 3 times USB2 seems very much... last I read, USB2 is clocked to 480 Mbps, i.e. 60 MBps), but to begin with, most hard drives can read no more than 60 MBps sustained.

    Most importantly, however, during normal usage, most idle time to due hard drive latency isn't spent waiting for the hard drive to transfer the data off the platters, but waiting for the head arm to seek to the right cylinder. Seek time ain't going to be reduced just by switching to another bus interface.

  4. Been there, done better by billcopc · · Score: 3, Insightful

    eSATA is cute and all, but nothing's ever stopped me from routing regular SATA cables out the back of the case, to a nice external hot-swap drive tower. Many higher-end motherboards even come with a little bracket for external SATA ports. While I understand that eSATA is somewhat improved for signal integrity and ease of use (grippy connectors), it doesn't seem like such a big deal to me. I haven't seen a single motherboard with eSATA yet, though some "platinum edition" boards do have a true SATA jack on the backplane. If you want both simplicity and speed. For idiot-proof simplicity there's the ubiquitous USB. For speed there's the real SATA. Is there really anything in between that needs eSATA at all ?

    --
    -Billco, Fnarg.com