Re: Which do you think will be around longer - SATA, eSATA or USB?

"JLH" wrote:
I'll probably be buying a new drive or two soon and wanted
to get your opinion about which type of drive - SATA, eSATA
or USB - you think will still be in use on both existing and new
systems over the next five years or so.

For external hard drives - eSATA. eSATA is virtually SATA
with a shielded cable and a controller with a tolerance for a wider
range of signal power to handle the longer allowable cable, so it's
as fast as SATA internal hard drives and much faster than USB
or Firewire. The Pain In The *** until now has been the very
inflexible shielded cable, but more flexible cables have entered
the market in response to this difficulty. I recently bought a 6'
eSATA cable from Silicon Valley Compucycle
( http://www.svc.com/sata-cable.html ), and what I got was a
"round" eSATA cable made in China, imported by OKGear.
The cross-sectional diagram shows 4 conductor wires, 4 ground
wires, aluminum foil shielding and a metal braid shielding, covered
by a black "rubber" sheath. It is 3/16" in diameter and surprisingly
flexible, given the supposed foil and braid shielding. As far as I
can tell, it works fine.

A check of Dell's offerrings shows eSATA on the motherboard
seems to be creeping into desktops. But if you don't have eSATA on
your motherboard, for a desktop you can use an expansion backpanel
adapter that interfaces with one of the internal SATA ports, or you
could use a PCIe eSATA adapter. For a laptop you can use an
Expresscard adapter. I use the latter for my Dell laptop, and it works
as advertized, which means you can use it for data storage, but you
can't boot from it. (SIIG makes both PCIe and Expresscard adapters
for eSATA.) With the growing need for large portable data storage,
I can't see eSATA fading away in favor of USB. For info on eSATA,
here's a white paper by Silicon Image from the SATA-IO.org website:
http://www.sata-io.org/documents/External%20SATA%20WP%2011-09.pdf

BTW, for eSATA enclosures, Kingwin sells a line which includes
an external power supply and a cooling fan (heat buildup being one of
the killers of external hard drives). Check Kingwin's website for models,
then search Nextag.com, PriceWatch.com, etc. for real-world prices.

*TimDaniels*


.

Quantcast