Slashdot Mirror
eSATA Connectors
buffalocheese writes "Since the introduction of the Serial ATA 1.0a specification in 2002, many manufacturers have introduced PCI and CardBus cards with both internal and external SATA connections.
At first these internal and external connectors were completely identical, but later, external connectors started to appear which were still fully compatible with the internal sockets but featured added extra screening for external use.
With the introduction of the SATA II specification in mid 2004 a new external SATA connector was defined. These new external (eSATA) connectors are not compatible with the original internal SATA connection.
Currently there are add-on cards and drive housings available which feature both types of SATA connection for external use. Gradually the older types will disappear and all new SATA cards will feature the eSATA connector for external drive connections."
While I'm not as certain when it comes to graphics cards, PCI-Express is/was sorely needed to replace PCI for general expansion cards.
Hardly. The typical PC wouldn't even go close to saturating a basic 33Mhz/32 bit PCI bus. They just don't do enough "stuff".
PCI had a limited amount of bandwidth available that was extremely easy to saturate (A single gigabit NIC would hit a bandwidth wall at something like 400mbit).
33/32 PCI, as seen in most consumer level systems, tops out at around 120MB/sec aggregate bandwidth. *Most* people wouldn't come anywhere close to that, except in contrived (and hence rare) benchmarking situations. Copying a file over the network to another machine is a reasonable example of one of the few ways this might happen, but average consumer level hard disks won't sustain much more than about 50MB/s (except in ideal conditions) and it's unlikely the machine on the other end will be much better.