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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."

3 of 100 comments (clear)

  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. 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
  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.