Are We Ready for eSATA?
Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: eSATA,, USB,, Flash | Themes: Business
- 1. An eSATA Flash Drive Market is Born
- 2. Getting the Most Out of a Flash Drive
- 3. eSATA Flash Drives For Disaster Recovery
- 4. XP Registry Edits for Flash-Friendly Disaster Recovery
- 5. eSATA Flash Drive Specification Table
- 6. Kanguru e-Flash
- 7. OCZ Throttle
- 8. RiData eSATA SSD
- 9. eSATA Flash Drive Performance Tests
- 10. Test Conclusions
- 11. Are We Ready for eSATA?
- 12. More on this topic
11. Are We Ready for eSATA?
If you have an eSATA port on your PC, then you are ready to go. You will just have to ensure that you have a power source. The Kanguru drive is the best choice if you have a desktop computer because it includes the adapter to connect to both SATA and a power source. Therefore, you do not have to use the USB cable, like you would with the OCZ unit. It is difficult to find a laptop with an eSATA port that is not powered. However, if you’ve got one, the OCZ unit would be a better choice since the USB port can power it.
It is a good idea to purchase a powered version, since otherwise you will have to use a drive with a USB cable to provide power. You also will have to install drivers for these devices before you can use them.
If you make a bootable eSATA flash drive, make sure the add-in card you buy supports booting via a loadable driver. We were able to do our tests with an Expresscard on a laptop without an eSATA port and found performance to be equivalent to computers with internal eSATA ports. In fact, there was very little difference between the desktop eSATA port speed and the laptop eSATA port speed, except when the laptops were in an energy-savings mode.
The Future of eSATA
All laptops and desktops already support both SATA and USB. Creating a shared port that supplies power and eSATA connectivity should be easy for most manufacturers to accomplish. Soon, an entire new line of eSATA-powered products could emerge. We will likely see not only faster eSATA flash drives that run on the powered port but also 2.5” eSATA connected hard drives. This would clearly be a performance boost for anyone who uses external drives.
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wait for usb 3.0
Sata IO(6.0Gb/s) is available this year. USB 3.0(4.8Gb/s) not ready til 2010
USB 3.0 is slated to support up to 4.8Gbps, eSATA supports up to 3.0Gbps now. SATA 6Gb/s is approved so that should also trickle down to eSATA. Since current USB suffers from a loss due to overhead of 25% the new 3.0 USB must be more effecient to compete with SATA 3 GB/s. It should also be noted that eSATA can support RAID and other HDD type features not available in USB devices. This could get interesting.
I doubt 3.0 will be able to compete. It still uses the host CPU for low level protocol processing, and thus, will never reach it's max bandwidth outside of the theoretical.
I doubt even USB 3.0 will be able to out preform even SATA 3 GB/s in real world testing.
Currently USB has a loss of about 25% due to overhead. If that loss continues then it would perform at 3.6 Gb/s. I think if eSATA flash and HDD if they can get powered eSATA ports in more than laptops, could really take off now and not wait until 2010 for USB 3.0.
Thanks for the article but why is it on Toms Guide and not Toms Hardware? Even your own charts use the Toms Hardware logo!
JeanLuc,
So sorry to confuse you! External USB (and, now, eSATA) thumb drives are definitely a Tom's Guide consumer electronics product. Apologies for the logo confusion.
Rachel Rosmarin
Editor of Tom's Guide
Even on USB, those drive put my drives to shame
Now if only they'd start selling them here!
I have a Throttle and for unknown reasons it DOES not run at 90mb/s on an exresscard esata setup. Tried several machines. All I could get is 40mb/s. Maybe esata from the MB would be faster. Need to try it.
Hey bobo0, I could not get the Throttle or other to 90MB/sec even with the internal SATA connector on a motherboard. I could get 75-80 very consistently on my laptops and desktops so do not be discouraged. Try disabling any power management on your laptop as I experienced much slower performance when power management was set to give the most battery life.
Not sure how 6.2 was obtained on Windows Experience rating, since the scale goes from 1.0 to 5.9:
http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/w [...] 61033.mspx
Not sure how 6.2 was obtained on Windows Experience rating, since the scale goes from 1.0 to 5.9:http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/w [...] 61033.mspx
if you had cared to read you're own link, you would have seen this:
6.2 was in Windows 7 and there is a screen shot of it shown. So obviously it does go higher now. Thanks for pointing that out.
I got a few pings on where to find the RiData unit. It is at
http://www.amazon.com/Ridata-RDESS [...] 469&sr=8-1
You can find the OCZ and Kanguru unit is at www.kanguru.com
Hey everyone, I wanted to let you know that Kanguru Solutions is working hard to resolve their issue and watch for them to rebound with a faster drive soon.
find another place to buy:
http://www.allstarshop.com/shop/pr [...] 25D2CQAAC9
For anyone interested, Kanguru system is releasing a new version of their flash drive. It will use a newer interface to speed up the read and write access of their drive. They are saying that the issue seen here was that they were first to market and had an older PCB that proved to be slower. Watch for this update.
Kanguru Solutions has updated their eSATA e-Flash drive as a direct result of our Tom’s Guide article.
As a direct result of our testing, Kanguru Solutions learned they were using an older version of the eSATA controller on the flash drive. This accounted for their slower performance during our test. They have corrected the issue and their performance is now equal to or greater than the other two drives. Testing using the eSATA interface showed random access went from 0.4 to 0.2 ms, average read went from 66.7 to a new high of 80.8 MB/sec, average write want from 48 to 52.6 MB/sec. This resolves all the issue with the eSATA e-Flash drive making it a top performer with the best package.