Spec Will Cut External Drive Power Cords

Lucas123 writes "The Serial ATA International Organization just revealed that it is well along the way to finishing a specification that would remove separate power cords to external SATA drives or optical disk drives, allowing them to draw power from the host system. The resulting new cable, being called Power Over eSATA, will be compatible with the existing eSATA connector and support the current maximum interface transfer rate of 3Gb/s. The SATA organization expects the new cables to be released later this year to drive makers."

Cables

[ackthpt (218170)]

I wish they'd do something about this piss-poor connectors. I've had a number of them fail and had to junk them because they do not make a good solid connection, nothing prevents vibration from letting them slip.

Re:Cables

[by Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you are not properly placing your vibrator?

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[pilgrim23 (716938)]

GOSH! they might even invent... Firewire! Who'da think it.

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[Jeff DeMaagd (2015)]

Firewire is more expensive and a non-native interface. FW800 is the closest to eSATA in performance, and even then, it's more expensive and slower.

Re:Cables

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

and a non-native interface

Every single interface since IDE and SCSI have been non-native. That's what Integrated Drive Electronics means. The controller no longer sends native commands like 'move disk head' and 'read bytes' it sends abstract commands like 'read block 1406.' Your on disk controller translates these in to native commands. It is no harder to build a device that accepts FireWire commands directly and translates them in to native commands than it is to build one that understands SCSI or SATA. Most current FireWire drives go via SCSI or ATA because there is a much bigger demand for ATA drives than FireWire, but FireWire commands are almost identical to SCSI commands so such a drive could easily be built.

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[jandrese (485)]

I have to agree with you on this. Even the internal cables feel pretty loose to me and will come off with the slightest tug. Sometimes I find a nice cable and a compatible drive and they'll click together nice and solid, but for the most part they just don't have the holding power I would like. Even if they don't fall off, they're probably the flimsiest connector you're likely to use on an external connection of any sort on your computer these days. I have a few that have metal reinforcement on them, bu

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[flaming error (1041742)]

I agree. Any strain, and they come right out. So I bend the cable over the external drive, and duct tape it to the unit so it doesn't slip.

Re:Cables

[Jackie_Chan_Fan (730745)]

They also snap off and break! The piece of shit plastic slot on the hard drives, snaps off with ease.

The durability of Sata connectors suck.

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[Yo Grark (465041)]

Tell me about it.

Had 3 of them "snap" off of 2 separate motherboards after only a few connect/disconnects.

And before people tell me "it must be you", I had a technician call me and tell me he had to replace the mobo because he broke the remaining one off when he unplugged it to test a new HD.

Granted it was one of the first generation mobo's, but we're talking ASUS boards here, not asrock (and YES I know, god you guys are picky!)

Yo Grark

Re:At least its not Power Over SATA

[theRiallatar (584902)]

You say POSATO, I say POSATA.

Re:At least its not Power Over SATA

[MiniMike (234881)]

Maybe they could call it PATA to avoid confusion...

Should have been in the spec from day 1

[krog (25663)]

Seriously -- it's two more pins. Why wasn't the spec designed right in the first place?

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[Daimanta (1140543)]

Because it would require thinking and *gasp* some work.

Re:Should have been in the spec from day 1

[RingDev (879105)]

It could have been a political issue in the industry as well. If there was strong opposition to any specific power over SATA spec, it could have held up the spec. Where as, going live with the widely accepted standard, and gaining a foothold, the spec now has the power to determine what the manufacturers should do as opposed to the other way around.

-Rick

no excuse

[krog (25663)]

USB has supported bus power forever. There's a protocol (devices can use up to 100mA without asking, up to 500mA with host device permission) and it works. eSATA, a newer spec, did not learn from this??

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[rucs_hack (784150)]

USB has supported bus power forever.

Yes, but only well for small devices. My iPod is supposed to be USB charged, but the trickle feed is useless for it. Apart from a joystick and keyboard I have, I avoid usb powered devices nowadays.

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[krog (25663)]

That's ok; USB isn't designed to power heavy loads. 2.5W (5V x 500mA) is enough to spin a hard drive, light up the Num Lock lamp, illuminate an optical mouse, etc. And no one is saying eSATA power should be as limited as USB. I'm just making the point that a protocol for bus power existed, it is a killer feature for an external HD connection scheme, and the designers of eSATA chose to ignore it. Lazy.

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[Firethorn (177587)]

That's ok; USB isn't designed to power heavy loads. 2.5W (5V x 500mA) is enough to spin a hard drive

It's enough to spin up a laptop HD, but not enough for the cheaper and higher storage but larger3.5" desktop type drives.

Thus those drives need supplimental power, which is still annoying.

I'd have been happier with a limit around 12 watts, which is enough to power a 7200RPM HD, though you might need a capaciter to limit current draw during peaks.

12W@12V would be 1 Amp, so you'd only need a marginally thicker

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[Znork (31774)]

12W@12V would be 1 Amp, so you'd only need a marginally thicker cable(or two)

Multiply it by 4 for sata and 4-8 for USB, and you would, however, have a noticably thicker motherboard (and/or separate PSU connectors and caps beside the USB and SATA connectors).

It's most likely not the cable that's the problem but the actual electronics that have to support the rated draw of the cable. Or worse, imagine having motherboards that dont support the rated draw and having users calling tech support with 'my computer

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[cheater512 (783349)]

Why are you talking about batteries?

5v is standard for TTL (transistor-transistor logic) digital circuits. 3.3v for more complex chips and 1.8v for low power stuff.
Good luck getting batteries to produce any of those voltages.
You will find all three of them plus 12v in your computer however.

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[RingDev (879105)]

...did not learn from this??

No idea, but a political argument theory holds more water than a "because they're dumb" theory IMO.

-Rick

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[ScrappyLaptop (733753)]

Never attribute to incompetence that which you can attribute to managment best practices.

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[Znork (31774)]

I can easily think of actual technical issues on this one.

See, historically, disks have had their power supported by the PSU directly. Now you want to replace IDE and put SATA connectors on the motherboard. That's fine. Then you want the SATA connectors to supply power enough to drive one disk? Ok... Then you want the SATA connectors to supply enough power to drive four disks? That's an 80W or more power bus over the motherboard; motherboard manufacturers had just about gotten over having to add new power c

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[jo42 (227475)]

Why wasn't the spec designed right in the first place?

Because most of the time, the people that write these specs, or design this stuff, don't seem to use any products in the real world...

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[WarlockD (623872)]

Maybe because of the fact that some drives use both 5v and 12v. Or that the 3.3v (does any drive use that yet?) was needed

To be honest, I don't even see if its possible for internal drives 3.5. Most of those drives use upwards of an amp off the 12v, and pushing 12watts down a little sata cable sounds like it would cause interference. Heck, it also means we have to add yet another 12v rail to the motherboard to support the power. It would be nice, however, for it on the eSATA connector. But thats the

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[pclminion (145572)]

pushing 12watts down a little sata cable sounds like it would cause interference.

It's DC. How could that cause interference?

40% more pins!? ARE YOU CRAZY?

[hxnwix (652290)]

Why wasn't it in original parallel ATA? 2 more ATA-66 pins would be a mere 2.5% pin count increase, whereas here it is a 40% increase!

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[rrkap (634128)]

It did get included eventually. 2.5" drives use 44pin IDE cables that carry signal and power.

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[Jeff DeMaagd (2015)]

It's not "just" two pins, definitely not the same size conductor. I think the drives need as much as one amp on 12V and 5V, and it looks like at least four conductors are used to do that.

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[truesaer (135079)]

That's an awfully simplistic view. A lot of devices use a lot of pins for power and ground, to ensure they can supply enough power. Otherwise if you use 2 you might need to use unusually large wires/pins, which can be awkward. Further, there are noise issues to consider. The power pins can't cause any interference on the data pins.

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[krog (25663)]

Of course proper shielding is necessary, but if you're in a position to design a cable which will support throughput of 3Gb/s, you are in a position to supply power in the same package. In practice, crosstalk from other data cables is a much greater problem than interference on the power supply rail. (Disclaimer: I'm an analog EE; I think about this crap.)

USB? Firewire?

[snib (911978)]

I guess I don't understand the value of eSATA. I don't see many eSATA drives, and I don't see many eSATA ports on computers or devices. Do we really need to add yet another port to laptops, in addition to the audio in/out, multimedia card, USB, Firewire, VGA, DVI, S-Video, Serial, Ethernet, Modem, etc etc? Wouldn't it make more sense to start eliminating ports and making everything work over USB, or Firewire, or some other spec?

As far as the article, it looks like a neat new development, but I know that you can get power over USB and Firewire. Maybe not enough for an external hard drive (I don't know), but IMHO it makes more sense to upgrade the power capabilities of universal technologies rather than promoting an exclusively hard drive-related format.

Re:USB? Firewire?

[jandrese (485)]

I think the advantage is supposed to be cost and speed. eSATA is faster than USB and Firewire (I think, dunno about the latest Firewire) and requires absolutely _no_ on board logic to work. With this new spec an external eSATA case is literally a metal box with a hole in it, maybe a passthrough connector if they're feeling swanky. They don't even need the transformer anymore. That makes it cheaper than USB and especially firewire.

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[Jackie_Chan_Fan (730745)]

try backing up your data to external 1TB drives through USB2. You'll soon see the importance of ESATA :)

SPEED.

USB is painful for disk transfers!

ESATA is the way.

Re:USB? Firewire?

[Solra Bizna (716281)]

FireWire is a fairly general-purpose specification, designed so that devices that require a fixed (and quite large) amount of bandwidth can be guaranteed it, and designed with device-to-device communication in mind. Its maximum bandwidth is 400Mbps (unless you count FW800, which I will as soon as I see a device that supports it).

SATA is a storage-device-oriented specification, designed pretty much so that drives can pump data over it as fast as they can read it, with a centralized paradigm and a much higher peak bandwidth at 1.5Gbps (or 3Gbps, but see the note about FW800 above).

Using USB for storage devices is perverted and wrong; it's synchronous, so your practical bandwidth is limited by the length of your cable and the response time of the nodes at either side. On the other hand, a design like that is pretty great for things like user input devices, which is one reason nobody ever talks about making FireWire mice.

So, in summary, SATA is more suitable for disks than FireWire, and USB is dog-slow. Any questions?

-:sigma.SB

Re:USB? Firewire?

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

unless you count FW800, which I will as soon as I see a device that supports it

FireWire 800 has been around for ages. My old PowerBook (4 years old) and my 'new' MacBook Pro (1 year old) both support it and I have had two external LaCie hard drives for three years which have two FireWire 800 ports which allow drives to be chained together.

The spec has allowed 3200Mb/s over fibre for years but I've not seen any consumer products supporting it. The latest version of the spec (just approved) supports 3200Mb/s over the same cables and connectors as existing FireWire 800 systems.

How about for internal drives as well?

[DoofusOfDeath (636671)]

Is there much of a reason that we couldn't have single power+data connectors for internal HDD / DVD drives as well? Things are better now that IDE cables are less common, but I'd still be happy for a cleaner interior of my cases.

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[hey (83763)]

Nice idea. I like it tidy inside my computer as well.

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[Firethorn (177587)]

They take a lot of juice, potentially? Your standard wire going to the molex plugs in use are around 16 gauge, not exactly small. Mostly overkill, but traces are normally designed for fractions of an amp - think about video cards and their auxillery power ports today.

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[MBCook (132727)]

Not going to happen. There are certain considerations in external drives. Most won't take a ton of power, they'll be 7200 RPM or something like that. In a case, you see people with 10 and 15k drives that use much more power.

The biggest problem is that what we have works very well. It supplies a few different kinds of power (3.3/5/12v?) so they drive probably doesn't need to step that up or down. Using one power connector the external drive will have to step down the power from the max (12v?) to be able to

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[poot_rootbeer (188613)]

Is there much of a reason that we couldn't have single power+data connectors for internal HDD / DVD drives as well?

Nostalgia? The big ol' 4-pin Molex power connectors are practically the only thing inside a PC case that are still the same as they were when IBM first introduced them to the desktop twenty-seven years ago. If we get rid of those, we'll be severing the last remaining connection to the machine's origins.

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[MrNemesis (587188)]

Think of every 12V line going into every hard drive in your machine. Now think of every 12V line having to be routed through the motherboard.

It essentially won't happen because it'll make motherboards much more complicated (read: expensive). That said, power-over-SATA shoudl have been in the e-SATA spec from the beginning, glad I didn't hop on the bandwagon earlier.

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[Jeff DeMaagd (2015)]

SATA drives are already the equivalent to SCA, I don't think SCA was commonly done on a cable.

I can already slide a SATA drive into my computer and it plugs right into a back plane, without any cables. I also have an external hard drive enclosure whose drives automatically plug right into a backplane using the SATA power & data connector. eSATA is a little different.

If only they'd thought it out...

[ricebowl (999467)]

Power Over eSata?

Look at those uppercases, the only acronym/abbreviation they can go for is either POeS (not too great, but better than) POS...

I can only hope it's a meta-commentary, the designers' own reaction to another port and yet-another-acronym...

Wha-d-ya-mean "power cable?"

[DanQuixote (945427)]

One of my tech support calls was about 1980, my friend's mom had a computer, and she bought a printer, which she tried to hook up herself, but it wasn't working.

I went over there and quickly spied the problem... the data cable was connected, but there was no power cable hooked up.

She quite innocently and logically asked, "why do I need a separate power cable?"

People don't really give a damn that the power system and the data system are two separate systems. It really is completely reasonable for them to expect a single cable to power as well as communicate.

These folks shouldn't pat themselves on the back for a "new feature", they should try harder next time to close a bug out in something much less than 30 years!

This is a basic usability requirement that people persistantly ignore despite the rat's nests of cables running around all their gear. This is certainly one of the biggest reasons for the popularity of USB!

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[Frenchy_2001 (659163)]

"why do I need a separate power cable?"
because most computer systems are not designed to provide the few amps of current that a laser printer can need?
Because most of those interface are designed for low power peripherals and have specs mirroring that (USB for example can feed 0.5A into its own cable), but more powerful peripherals get plugged into it. So, to work, they need more power and get an external adapter.

The *REAL* problem comes from people unable (or, much more likely unwilling) to follow directio

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[DanQuixote (945427)]

Clearly you are a good engineer, and as every good engineer knows, it's all about trade-offs. If Tesla had his way, there would indeed NOT be a separate power cord for the TV.

Overall historically, we've made pretty good decisions about how to handle power. However, in the last 10 years I have been very disappointed with consumer electronics. Powering a device is a major requirement for anything we design, yet batteries still suck, wall-warts continue to proliferate, mp3 players don't charge via a standar

Existing power situation with SATA is hilarious

[dwalsh (87765)]

Parallel ATA (A.K.A IDE): Big Parallel data cable with a shitload of pins. 4 pin power cable.

Serial ATA: Serial data cable with just 7 pins. Power cable has twice as many pins!

Did they just move the lines to the power cable? :-)

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[Gat0r30y (957941)]

7 pins, but just 4 wires going in (unless you got a 3.3V line too which is not necessary on the bulk of SATA drives). The 7 pins make it hot swapable, you can just yank power to a drive, and it doesn't hose the whole thing. I do failure analysis on hard drives all day (its my job), and for me it is about the best part of the SATA spec (since I don't have to reboot machines just to throw a different drive in for testing).
On another note, I'd guess this is also why it took so long to come out with an eSA

Re:Obligatory remark...

[krog (25663)]

No one obligated you to say something that threadbare and devoid of humor. No one. You did it on your own.