What to use Esata port for?

[ProfA]

Had an ESATA port on the HP microserver I built up for my brother. Bought an ESATA to SATA cable and connected a internal Blu Ray writer to it as there was an additional power cable in the case I could use.

Question I have now.....I have an ESATA port on my Laptop. What do I use it for? And where do I buy the cable to use whatever device I need to it?

 

[AstroTurf]

External drives.

 

[garyc]

There are external drives with eSATA. These are becoming less common due to USB3.

 

[robdutchmonkey]

I have an esata cable or two still in stock but it never really kicked off that well, it's basically only for external drives which has now become redundant since usb 3.0

 

[Space_Chief]

I have an esata cable or two still in stock but it never really kicked off that well, it's basically only for external drives which has now become redundant since usb 3.0

eSATA 6G is 6GB/sec though vs USB 3.0's 5GB/sec which can also include overhead.

 

[mintydroid]

Get a cable and use one of the drives for storage and the other for a ssd.

 

[Swa]

eSATA 6G is 6GB/sec though vs USB 3.0's 5GB/sec which can also include overhead.

That says a lot. Even SSD can't make use of SATA 3.0 bandwidth yet so it's no wonder it never took off with even USB2.0 fast enough for most external drives.

 

[D4N]

The nice thing about esata is that you have low level access to the drive which means you can run diagnostics and repairs that might not work through USB

 

[Space_Chief]

That says a lot. Even SSD can't make use of SATA 3.0 bandwidth yet so it's no wonder it never took off with even USB2.0 fast enough for most external drives.

Sustained Data Rates up to 559MB/s Read, 527MB/s Write

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Mercury_Extreme_Pro_6G/

Better SSDs are capable of such speeds. So yes, a 6Gb/sec max will be able to handle that, 5Gb/sec may not.

Oh, never mind a RAID-0 arrangement of two such SSD drives.

Actually the eSATA and USB 3 speeds are in Gb/sec - gigabits, so divide by 8. Sorry it's not GigaBytes per sec. The eSATA will still be beneficial for an SSD as above, and especially a RAID-0 of such drives.
USB also reserves some b/w for overhead so the effective speed is lower than a full 5 Gb/sec, while eSATA does not. Also external drive cases when connected by USB have to translate SATA to USB as the drive is connected by a SATA connection to the external drive. That can cost in terms of data transfer speed. eSATA connection will be a "RAW" SATA connection through a cable to the drive, the way the drive was connected internally.

Of course Thunderbolt is 10Gb/sec. But it's more expensive.

 

[genetic]

even USB2.0 fast enough for most external drives.

:erm:

Are you living in 2002?

USB2 has a sustained rate of around 30MB/s MAX.

 

[Space_Chief]

:erm:

Are you living in 2002?

USB2 has a sustained rate of around 30MB/s MAX.

I think I confused him. I said USB 3 was 5GB/sec (Giga Bytes per sec). It's Gigabits. Likewise USB 2 is 480Mbits/sec and not 480MegaBytes per sec. Best SSDs do about 550MB/sec sustained and if you confuse 480Mb/sec with 480MB/sec that's very close.

b=bits
B=bytes for those few who don't know.

 

[Swa]

I think I confused him. I said USB 3 was 5GB/sec (Giga Bytes per sec). It's Gigabits. Likewise USB 2 is 480Mbits/sec and not 480MegaBytes per sec. Best SSDs do about 550MB/sec sustained and if you confuse 480Mb/sec with 480MB/sec that's very close.

b=bits
B=bytes for those few who don't know.

Actually I was referring to making use of the bandwidth. USB 3 is 4Gbps data rate. Most manufacturer rated SSDs never come close to their sustained transfer rates in benchmark tests. Even from those that do the sustained rates do not represent realistic usage scenarios.

My USB 2 comment was referring to external drives and not SSDs.

Btw there's an update to USB 3 that pushes it up to 10Gbps with a claimed 3% overhead.

 

[D4N]

Actually I was referring to making use of the bandwidth. USB 3 is 4Gbps data rate. Most manufacturer rated SSDs never come close to their sustained transfer rates in benchmark tests. Even from those that do the sustained rates do not represent realistic usage scenarios.

My USB 2 comment was referring to external drives and not SSDs.

Btw there's an update to USB 3 that pushes it up to 10Gbps with a claimed 3% overhead.

The practical max transfer rate for USB2 is about 27 Megabytes/s. Hard disk drives in USB3 enclosures go up to 100 Megabytes/s so USB2 is defenitly not fast enough.

 

[Space_Chief]

Actually I was referring to making use of the bandwidth. USB 3 is 4Gbps data rate. Most manufacturer rated SSDs never come close to their sustained transfer rates in benchmark tests. Even from those that do the sustained rates do not represent realistic usage scenarios.

My USB 2 comment was referring to external drives and not SSDs.

Btw there's an update to USB 3 that pushes it up to 10Gbps with a claimed 3% overhead.

USB3's max theoretical data rate is 5Gb/sec.

Sustained rates on single drives seem realistic to me but depend on your usage. The device I have which is the previous version (SATA2) of the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro is able to go as fast as the rating in real world situations. This is very useful for backing up large files and copying large video files, if you do this frequently it's helpful as it gets done twice as fast as a cheaper SSD and 4-5 times as fast as a standard HDD at about 100MB/sec sustained. But you can also get an external RAID of these drives in which case with the new SATA3 variants you'll get double 550GB of over 1TB/sec.

For applications where you wish to move a ton of stuff quickly, especially big files - maybe database and RAW video backup, or even ripped Blurays/DVDs or HDD image files, the faster the better. Uncompressed is especially nice as some of these SSDs use compression to achieve faster throughput.

 

[Space_Chief]

The practical max transfer rate for USB2 is about 27 Megabytes/s. Hard disk drives in USB3 enclosures go up to 100 Megabytes/s so USB2 is defenitly not fast enough.

I get about 32-35MB/sec consistently, but that's close to 27MB/sec so yes, I agree.



And I agree with the 100MB/sec on 5400 RPM drives in USB3 enclosures. I get about 100-110MB/sec max write speed with those off a SATA3 Samsung Pro SSD being the source drive.

 

[Swa]

35MB is a realistic practical speed, but yes with many systems not optimised properly 32 is most probably the real world speed. My internal drive only does 50-60 so not a big issue imho for external storage drives. USB does seem to use a lot of CPU though.