eSATA External Storage Drive Reviewed 100
Tom's Hardware has a practical look at an eSATA drive offering from Taiwanese storage firm Thecus. From the article: "Thecus' N2050 is one of the first external twin-drive RAID boxes that uses eSATA. As expected, its performance was far better than what USB 2.0 offers. The end result is impressive. The date transfer rate of 30 MB/s that USB 2.0 offers does indeed pale in comparison to 100 MB/s for eSATA, while the WD1500 drives are capable of delivering even better performance in RAID 0. It is also good to see that Thecus did not throw the USB 2.0 interface away, because it is a nice backup interface whenyou want to use the device with other computers via USB 2.0."
Meant for whom? (Score:2, Insightful)
And why does the type of home user who shuns opening his or her case need mind-blowing performa
Re:Meant for whom? (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of technically inclined people, myself included, use an external hard drive for backup purposes. It would be really nice to cut the time needed to perform a full backup in half.
Just because it's easy and portable doesn't make it for the non-techs only.
Re:Meant for whom? (Score:4, Insightful)
In fact, that's what makes tech cheaper for us...it's the rest of the non-techs buying a new computer whenever theirs is "broken" from too much spyware, or needs a little more RAM. If everyone bought PC hardware only when needed and jealously guarded every CPU cycle, PCs would still be as expensive as they were 20 years ago.
Re:Meant for whom? (Score:2)
Re:Meant for whom? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Meant for whom? (Score:2)
Re:Meant for whom? (Score:2)
Re:Meant for whom? (Score:1)
although ive found my usb2 hd is fast enough already, a few gigs can be transfered in under 60 seconds, do we really need anything that goes faster?
D-cinema needs this, for starters. (Score:2, Informative)
As someone who works in the realm of digital cinema, I can state unequivocally that "we" (those of us working within the context of d-cinema) definitely do. In fact, I was in LA last week to preview a prototype uncompressedHD recorder that used e-sata based storage expansion. But back to the raw numbers-- even if you're just using e-sata as an archiving interface (which it would be very convenient for), you'll need to move your footage to the devices in as cl
Re:Meant for whom? (Score:3, Informative)
Sure, a USB drive works, but when you are talking about 100's of gigs of data, and everytime they pan around the map a chunk of it is going to be pull
Re:Meant for whom? (Score:1)
Re:Meant for whom? (Score:1)
Re:Meant for whom? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Meant for whom? (Score:1)
"Therefore, USB/Firewire hard drives are used all over the place to store sensitive data."
For an overview of the external drive types in use, visit your local souk or bazaar.
Re:Meant for whom? (Score:1)
USB works well enough for most people and it will also support their cameras, printers, scanners, thumb drives, gamepads, cell phones, etc. The last time something better came out (firewire), USB was just updated to faster speeds. Th
Re:Meant for whom? (Score:3, Interesting)
The internal 2.5" drives on most laptops are too small and too slow for video editing, so I have a pair of external FireWire 800 disks. These give me much better performance than the internal disk. eSATA will be a huge improvement because it gives me:
Re:Meant for whom? (Score:1)
Re:Meant for whom? (Score:2)
I feel comfortable opening my computer, but why should I? I like being able to plug in blocks of 250 or more Gigabytes. It is portable, but it is also damn easy and just as cheap as the other solutions. LaCie Porsche drives have dropped to around $125USD for 250 GB (USB only) where the EIDE drive, sans case is about $100USD. The cost seems worth it to me. The speed isn't as gre
Easy TiVo expansion (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Easy TiVo expansion (Score:2)
Re:Meant for whom? (Score:2)
Re:Meant for whom? (Score:1)
Most people just delete their porn. (seriously, dont mod me funny)
Re:Meant for whom? (Score:2)
Such a solution is great for a lot of people. Think digital photography types. We can produce insane amounts of data in no time (I took 30 gig of photos just this weekend on a trip). You can't keep up with internal storage. And for people like me who have a Powermac, you are limited to 2 internal driv
Re:Meant for whom? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't shun opening my case, however, with 18 drives in it already it's physically incapable of holding any more - and I still have three 100Mhz, 64-bit PCI-X slots free.
More importantly, I'd prefer to pay $hundreds for some small, quiet, multi-drive eSATA enclosure than $thousands for a huge, noisy server chassis capable of holding more drives requiring the inconvenience and risk of relocating the internal
eSATA enclosures (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.cooldrives.com/mac-port-multiplier-sat
Re:eSATA enclosures (Score:2)
ALL ENCLOSURE SALES ARE FINAL. Due to the volume of uninformed purchases, enclosures can be returned FOR WARRANTY REPAIR ONLY (NO REFUNDS).
The drive costs 468.98 with a PCI-E controller. This seems like a pretty good deal if it has good raid performance. It is hard to buy a decent raid card, one that won't burden down the CPU, at that price plus a place to actually store 5 drives and the power connections with swap trays. I just wonder what is so uninforming
Uninforming:The users not looking for information (Score:1)
Review model had RAID built in (Score:2)
However if I'm going to have an external enclosure doing RAID, I really want to be able to swap out the drives easily - the reviewed enclosure had screws you needed to remove to take of fthe top, after which you had to remove the top drive to reach the bottom.
Your enclosure looked interesting, I had not heard of external SATA enclosures that did port multiplying - and it doesn't seem you loose any throughput for doing so.
To get it shipped outside the US... (Score:2)
Other sources for external SATA stuff (Score:1)
Wiebetech has had 2 external raid sata units out for some time now, with hot swap drives. A SilverSATA line with up to 5 hotswap drives and a RAID 5, the RT5, which also comes with USB and firewire.
http://www.wiebetech.com/home.php [wiebetech.com]
They will do direct international sales but I think they have european dis
prize? (Score:2)
a prize for a 1Terabyte version? Comparable to NAS?
Is it reliable? (Score:2)
3x the speed is tempting, especially now that processer models only go up by 5% in performance (or less). I remember climbing a lot faster back in the 486 days, or even Pentium 1. WOW! Why can't our hardware increase like that any more? 30% increase per model #!
Re:Is it reliable? (Score:1)
Re:Is it reliable? (Score:2)
The Athlon XP 2400+ cpu was released in August 2002 and the Athlon 64 x2 3200+ was released in May 2005. (nearly 3 years, and easily half a dozen core revisions).
Contrast that with the Pentium 166 CPU which succeeded the Pentium 75 in one generation. (The "P54" was available in 75/90/100/120 MHz in releases staggered through '94 while its successor, the "P54C" was released staggered throughout the following year and was available at 133/150/166/200.
Even setting aside the Mhz myth, the
Re:Is it reliable? (Score:1)
Re:Is it reliable? (Score:3, Insightful)
Most importantly, however, during normal usage, most idle time to due hard drive latency isn't spent waiting for the hard drive to transfer the data off the platters, but waiting for the he
Re:Is it reliable? (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry to be replying to my own post, but looking at THG's IOMeter benchmarks [tomshardware.com], my theory seems to be verifiable.
Re:Is it reliable? (Score:2)
RAID1 is far faster than RAID0 for reads, because you can read from whichever disk has the least activity. Its a lot slower for writes, because you need to wait for the slowest disk to send a confirmation. Although for writes you can often use a middle ground where you wait for the first disk to hardware-confirm a write, and then move on. That way you're safe unless you get a machine crash and a H
Re:Is it reliable? (Score:2)
eSATA drawbacks (Score:4, Informative)
Also, mentioned in the article... the SATA bus boasts a wonderful 3Gb/s (or 300MB/s). This however, is not the bottle neck when it comes to performence. As the article mentions, the top SATA drives on the market today only get about 85MB/s read/write to the disk. So although you may get 300MB/s from the disk cache, and the controller, you'll never really get 300MB/s. Still, it's miles from Ultra-ATA.
Re:eSATA drawbacks (Score:5, Informative)
We don't need no stinkin' ports on the mobo... (Score:1)
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=esata+%22pci+
you're missing the point (Score:5, Informative)
It is true that a single drive cannot saturate the SATA channel. (85MB/s is actually a _very_ generous estimate. Typical performance is closer to 50-60MB/s). So, SATA certainly doesn't need more bandwidth in the near future. However, for eSATA, the extra bandwidth is _very_ useful. It would allow manufacturers to produce RAIDs with eSATA ports instead of SCSI or FC. (Right now, you still need a SCSI or FC card if you want to get any sort of performance). This would effectively commoditise the low-end RAID market, which is a very welcome development.
Re:you're missing the point (Score:1)
Last time I checked FC Cards were around the same price as SCSI, the drives were cheaper (YMMV), and buses being serial, were much easier to route inside a case. And yes, SCSI-Ultra320 (much slower than FC) is much faster than SATA and still faster than eSATA.
Re:you're missing the point (Score:1)
-Blake
Re:eSATA drawbacks (Score:4, Informative)
Re:eSATA drawbacks (Score:2, Interesting)
3Gb/s = 3 Gigabits per second = 384 MB/s = 384 MegaBytes per second
The spec is:
300 MB/s = 300 MegaBytes per second = 2.344 Gb/s = 2.344 Gigabits per second
Spec: http://www.sata-io.org/esata.asp [sata-io.org]
Calculator [frii.com]
Re:eSATA drawbacks (Score:2)
10 bits are needed to transmit 1 byte of data, thus 3Gbs wire speed == 300MBs usable bandwidth.
Re:eSATA drawbacks (Score:2)
The great thing about USB is that it's compable with thousands of different devices. I don't want a different bus and connector for every different kind of device. I wish they could have just released a backwards compatible USB-3 instead of eSATA.
ASUS eSATA Support (was Re: eSATA drawbacks) (Score:2)
ASUS Model A8N-SLI Premium retail motherboard kit not only includes SATA
RAID on the motherboard, it also has an external eSATA (2 channel) breakout
via a slot cover.
Imagine two of these external SATA RAID boxes tied together in a 10 disk
RAID 10 (RAID 5 + 0) configuration, and using XFS or Reister FS
re: Meant for whom? (Score:4, Insightful)
And why does the type of home user who shuns opening his or her case need mind-blowing performance?
And why do you assume that an user who requires an external drive is a "home user who shuns opening his or her case"? Poppycock.
Scenario 1: All the drive bays in your machine are full, and Firewire's too slow because you move big files around.
Scenario 2: The data on the drive needs to go somewhere else.
My desktop drive bays are full, but for me, I see this as a great replacement for backup tape drives, w/o having to sacrifice throughput. Assuming that the enclosure will fit in a safety deposit box, a couple of these could replace my current network backup hardware.
Re: Meant for whom? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have been looking for a RAID solution that can be plugged into my notebook. I would like to have a RAID 0 or RAID 0+1 (but It would be nice if I could get RAID 5) unit that I could plug into my system maybe using a PCMCIA RAID controller card (although I do not know if that is even possible).
It seems (doh, I just made a google and found a possible answer) that there are eSata PCMCIA [cooldrives.com] adapters that do RAID 0,1.
Clustering/Networking over SATA anyone? (Score:1)
Re:Clustering/Networking over SATA anyone? (Score:2)
Re:Clustering/Networking over SATA anyone? (Score:1)
They could advertise it with pictures of the devil. Or a silhouette of a fat geek throwing the horns [penny-arcade.com].
And the answer is No BTW. SATA is just a new transport for ATA/ATAPI commands. So it supports disk drives, CD roms and so on. It doesn't support network like devices. Firewire does though.
No. (Score:3, Informative)
Usually, if a bus can accept multiple PCs, or even no PC at all, it's a good sign. If a bus is a 1PC + Multiple Peripheral topology, you're sure i'll probably NOT support IP.
Able to do IP
whole article ruined on page 6 for me: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:whole article ruined on page 6 for me: (Score:4, Informative)
Re:whole article ruined on page 6 for me: (Score:2)
Re:whole article ruined on page 6 for me: (Score:1)
Stripping and mirroring are two extremes, JBOD is the middle ground.
Important backups (email, taxes, checkbook, etc), which typically represents a small amount of HD space, you copy to both drives. It isn't ideal, but it's cheaper than cutting your HD space in half and works for the most part.
Honestly, I looked. (Score:2)
-d-
Yet another review stating an incorrect fact (Score:4, Informative)
Every single review of storage technologies I have read in the past 2 years state at least one (IMHO very important) incorrect fact. This is no exception with this one:
Page 2: "The fastest 3.5" SATA drives do not exceed 85 MB/s. A data transfer rate of 300 MB/s between a PC and a SATA drive cannot thus be matched by the speed of a SATA drive." Yes it can. When data is exchanged to/from the disk's cache, data throughput of 250+ MB/s can be achieved for a fraction of a second. Even if it's only for a fraction of a second, it is still important (else manufacturers would not even put cache memory on disks).
Re:Yet another review stating an incorrect fact (Score:1)
No, it's not important. The on-disk cache isn't there for throughput, it's there because of the disk's rotational latency.
In order to increase throughput in a useful way, it would have to be larger than the OS's cache, which will be several 10's (or mayb
Re:Yet another review stating an incorrect fact (Score:2)
I am not speaking about sustained throughput, I am speaking about burst transfers. So in this regard, I maintain that yes, a 300 MB/s sata link will make a difference and will improve (some) workloads.
Modern OSes already know how to optimize th
Re:Yet another review stating an incorrect fact (Score:1)
I am not speaking about sustained throughput, I am speaking about burst transfers. So in this regard, I maintain that yes, a 300 MB/s sata link will make a difference and will improve (some) workloads.
How? With DMA the rest of the system doesn't have to sit around waiting for the transfer to finish, so why does it care about the burst rate for such a small amoun
Re:Yet another review stating an incorrect fact (Score:3, Informative)
It is important in scenarios where a lot of small burst transfers happen almost all the time, like on a busy file server. In this case switching from 150 MB/s sata links to 300 MB/s ones will reduce the PCI/PCI-X/PCI-e bus utilization. Here is a realistic example: each 160 ms, a block of 8 MB of data needs to be sent to a sata disk, that means on average 6.25 blocks are sent per second (1000 / 160).
Re:Yet another review stating an incorrect fact (Score:1)
Ah. Now it makes sense.
hardware sites are lame (Score:1, Flamebait)
where to start...
* they use a pair of 15k rpm drives in the box. the box has one dinky fan. if this was your actual setup, you would be able to boil water in the box. not good for the drives.
* they say something like "thank god esata is so much faster than usb 2.0. look at our pretty statics showing transfer rate is the bottleneck." nonsense. If you are using a pair of raid 0 $400 drives, and you defrag your drives every couple minutes, then yes transfer rat
Re:hardware sites are lame (Score:1)
Why do reviewer's speculate? (Score:2, Insightful)
Or MAYBE... they just used an off the shelf part to connect two boards together because the parts were cheap and didn't require any new fabrication. I have a docking station that uses an "AGP Slot" t
Re:Why do reviewer's speculate? (Score:1)
So you don't like people talking about things they know nothing about? But you still read Slashdot? I sense some double standards.
Umm, why eSATA, just use SATA (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Umm, why eSATA, just use SATA (Score:2)
eSATA is just a standard for using SATA for external drives. It defines the connector, the cable, etc. This probably will repl
Re:Umm, why eSATA, just use SATA (Score:1)
No you don't. You have a Cardbus or ExpressCard slot. PCMCIA runs at about the same speed as the old ISA bus, so getting 85MB/sec out of it is somewhat unlikely.
I've never heard of an SATA expansion card for laptops either, but I'll take your word for it.
Who Cares? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Who Cares? (Score:3, Funny)
Moreover, who on Slashdot has ever had a "date" to transfer?
eSATA could be great for notebooks (Score:2)
Most notebooks ship with smaller hard drives and don't allow you to open the case and add a second drive.
eSATA would allow you to connect an external drive at full speed and without the cpu usage of USB2.
All that is missing is eSATA connectors on notebooks, but I have seen Cardbus adapters for eSATA. Also, notebooks are now starting to apppear with SATA drives (eg. the new Dell XPS notebook) so hopefully they will add eSATA connectors soon.
Scientific Atlanta Cable DVR (Score:1)
I bought a 250GB eSATA box for my DVR and it's performed perfectly. I have 410GB of storage for movies and time-shifting. (160GB on the cable box itself)
I paid about $150 plus shipping.
Power brick? ugh.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Been there, done better (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Been there, done better (Score:1)
Re:Been there, done better (Score:1)