eSATA, my prayers have been answered

**SiliconJon** · March 29th, 2006, 10:11 PM

If there's one thing I have come to enjoy the most in the last 5 years of my tech journey, it's external storage. Portability is a tool in of itself, and peripherality of my storage has made my frequent tear-downs, repairs, upgrades, and rebuilds almost dreamy.

And now SATA II's super spawn: eSATA. An external serial ATA port (or more) with a bandwidth ceiling more than twice my current hard drive 'height' at 3Gbit/s.

Just wanted to say thank you engineering developers. I'm waiting for my new baby to get back in stock so I may persue my next dream.

http://www.sata-io.org/esata.asp
http://www.sata-io.org/docs/External...WP%2011-09.pdf

**sechs** · March 29th, 2006, 10:42 PM

SCSI has been doing this for years. The full 320 from an external box....

**sr71000** · March 29th, 2006, 10:47 PM

they've had esata for a while as well...for sataI hehe....it's been around...just not popular

**SiliconJon** · March 30th, 2006, 10:23 AM

Been around for a while, eh? Well it's new to me! Darn that rock I've been hiding under. :P

Only one other post mentioning it here at TIMO, only two motherboards at ZZF with it (one AMD one intel, both Asrock), same on Anandtech's RTPE, no mobo's on RR...dang skippy it's not popular! Well, I appreciate it nonetheless

SCSI! Too expensive, yo!

**MTAtech** · March 30th, 2006, 10:36 AM

3Gb/s may be the bandwidth. Don't think that you will actually get the disk to read that fast.

**SiliconJon** · March 30th, 2006, 11:23 AM

Originally Posted by The Almighty and Powerful OZ, not the prison show on Showtime

a bandwidth ceiling more than twice my current hard drive 'height' at 3Gbit/s

No, but it sure looks like a great bandwidth improvement over USB2.0 and Firewire400.

**zepper** · March 30th, 2006, 11:33 AM

The max continuous transfer rate of the new Raptor is around 88MB/Sec. The current version of the old raptor hits about 72MB/sec. So eSATA may show a significant difference over USB or FW - at least until the next generation of each. But as was said above, many have already rigged an external SATA connection. The only difference is that hot-swap wasn't always available. While with true SATA II controller logic, it should be more common.

.bh.

**sr71000** · March 30th, 2006, 11:51 AM

hmmm...the earliest reference to esata i can find is pcworld in jan 2005....i guess it's newer than i thought! lol oh well...nice to hear it works well

.

**SiliconJon** · March 30th, 2006, 11:54 AM

You must be having too much fun, your time is flying!

Firewire800 has been around for a little while now...but I've heard less about it than eSATA.

**DanU** · March 30th, 2006, 12:40 PM

I had an "external" sata array back in 2004. It used a standard promise sata adapter, but the cables routed externally to a 4 disk enclosure.

**SiliconJon** · March 30th, 2006, 01:23 PM

[silly valley girl voice] SHUT UP! NUH UH! [/voice]

Did you make this enclosure?

**DanU** · March 30th, 2006, 05:07 PM

ooops double post

**DanU** · March 30th, 2006, 05:24 PM

It's a 4 disk "SCSI" enclosure with it's own power supply. The sata cables were just routed out the back and into the back of the PC, then plugged into the Promise SATA adapter. I guess I could have purchased external to internal sata adapters like these: http://www.usb-ware.com/sata-dual-in...al-adapter.htm. Those would have made for a nicer installation.

Total capacity was 1TB. For a while I was the envy of my peers

.

**SiliconJon** · March 30th, 2006, 06:27 PM

Ahhh, to be envied...been a loooong time since I bought or built anything envious. For myself, anyway.

**#43 fan** · March 30th, 2006, 06:47 PM

External SATA was implemented in the originial spec of SATA, but it is not popular.
And, unlike SCSI, it is not expensive.
I wish I could make people envious of my PC. Although, my beige box with window and cold cathode mod is pretty cool [I think, anyways].