eSATA External Storage Drive Reviewed

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."

Comments

eSATA enclosures

[c_g_hills]

eSATA enclosures have been around for a while. The larger ones tend to have a port multiplier built in, which lets you use up to 5 drives with a single channel. This is the one I am after, but sadly the company will not ship to the UK.

http://www.cooldrives.com/mac-port-multiplier-sata -case.html

Re:Meant for whom?

[jonnythan]

It's sure as heck nice to have both.

A lot of technically inclined people, myself included, use an external hard drive for backup purposes. It would be really nice to cut the time needed to perform a full backup in half.

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

Re:Meant for whom?

[detritus`]

Those of us who dont happen to have any room left in the case for new HDs seems to be a potential use. Or as a a portable boot up device for those who have to use multiple machines. Or those who would rather buy an external device without sacrificing the speed of an internal device.

Re:Meant for whom?

[ToxikFetus]

This could be beneficial for locales that deal with high-security information. Many offices cleared at a U.S. Secret level (or higher) must lock all classified materials in a safe at night. Therefore, USB/Firewire hard drives are used all over the place to store sensitive data. To be able to get SATA performance out of a relatively cheap external drive would be a boon for these offices.

Re:Meant for whom?

[TheRaven64]

Two words: Laptop users.

The internal 2.5" drives on most laptops are too small and too slow for video editing, so I have a pair of external FireWire 800 disks. These give me much better performance than the internal disk. eSATA will be a huge improvement because it gives me:

• About the same speed, and
• Doesn't have the ability to do daisy-chaining.

Umm, why are people trying to replace FW800 with eSATA again?

whole article ruined on page 6 for me:

[sneezinglion]

From the article on page 6: "We were surprised that it is necessary to choose between RAID 0 and RAID 1. RAID 0 will increase performance considerably, but it will put your data at risk, since the data of both drives will be lost if only one fails. If RAID 1 is selected, data is mirrored onto both drives, but the net capacity is split in half. A just a bunch of drives (JBOD would be a suitable alternative, because it spans data across both drives. If one fails, the data on the second drive can be recovered." I am confused where they think the redundancy is on jbod?

Re:eSATA drawbacks

[bobbutts]

3Gb/s is wrong
3Gb/s = 3 Gigabits per second = 384 MB/s = 384 MegaBytes per second
The spec is:
300 MB/s = 300 MegaBytes per second = 2.344 Gb/s = 2.344 Gigabits per second
Spec: http://www.sata-io.org/esata.asp
Calculator

Power brick? ugh..

[yem]

What a pity they couldn't engineer a power rail into the eSATA spec.

Re: Meant for whom?

[xtracto]

I am in a kind of third category.

I have been looking for a RAID solution that can be plugged into my notebook. I would like to have a RAID 0 or RAID 0+1 (but It would be nice if I could get RAID 5) unit that I could plug into my system maybe using a PCMCIA RAID controller card (although I do not know if that is even possible).

It seems (doh, I just made a google and found a possible answer) that there are eSata PCMCIA adapters that do RAID 0,1.