e-sata on external hard drives? Worth it?

[StinkyPinky]

I'm thinking about getting a new external 3'5" hard drive. Currently all I have is an old 40 gig 2'5" external which is good for file sharing but useless for backups.

I'm looking at either a 320gb or 500gb external hard drive, and I'm wondering if the price premium for one that comes with e-sata is worth it? I have an e-sata port at the back of my pc (not at the front though), so what's the speed like in the real world? And how does it work? Does it just plug in and detect? Can I leave it permanently plugged in without damaging anything?

This drive will really only be used for backups. (probably will use acronis to just put a huge image on it)

 

[Blain]

* The speed is the same as having the same drive inside the case.
* Leaving it plugged in all the time raises the risk of something happening to the data, should your PC get hit with a power surge or virus attack.

 

[Paperdoc]

Speed of an external eSATA-connected drive is faster than USB2 and comparable to Firewire 400 (aka IEEE1394a).
Check your mobo manual on how it handles the eSATA port. Some older systems needed a software driver installed in the OS to use the eSATA port, which is really no problem - you just have to do it once, if required. But some mobo's BIOS's (like mine) make the eSATA port appear to be just another IDE device and the OS does not need any added drivers.

Also read the manual carefully on this point: many BIOS's offer to use the eSATA device as part of a RAID array of some type. I expect you do not want to do that. My mobo's manual did NOT make it clear that there was a non-RAID option, but when I went into the BIOS setup screens for that port there was an option to simply use the port as SATA (emulating IDE), without RAID functions, so I chose that. The external drive works great.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: Paperdoc
Speed of an external eSATA-connected drive is faster than USB2 and comparable to Firewire 400 (aka IEEE1394a).

eSATA is the same speed as internal SATA.
Firewire 1394a or 1394b are slower.

 

[Roguestar]

Originally posted by: Blain

Originally posted by: Paperdoc
Speed of an external eSATA-connected drive is faster than USB2 and comparable to Firewire 400 (aka IEEE1394a).

eSATA is the same speed as internal SATA.
Firewire 1394a or 1394b are slower.

The clue is in the SATA!

 

[RebateMonger]

eSATA or SATA connections to external drives will deliver transfer speeds updwards of 70 MegaBytes per second. USB 2.0 is more like 20-25 MegaBytes per second.

Whether you can take advantage of this depends on what you are doing with it. If you are sending data across a network, you likely won't see an improvement. Some programs are also write-speed limited. Microsoft's NTBackup, for instance, can't write faster than about 10 MegaBytes per second no matter what drive you use.

If used for backup, I recommend swapping the drive out with a different one periodically, and storing the detached drive separately (offsite if possible).

 

[Paperdoc]

Originally posted by: Blain

Originally posted by: Paperdoc
Speed of an external eSATA-connected drive is faster than USB2 and comparable to Firewire 400 (aka IEEE1394a).

eSATA is the same speed as internal SATA.
Firewire 1394a or 1394b are slower.

That's what the specs say for maximum burst tranmission rate. But for average sustained data transmission rates you need real-world testing. One set of such data, about two years old:

http://www.tomshardware.com/re...-drive-esata,1307.html

shows IEEE1394b (Firewire 800) fastest of all tested, eSATA and directly-connected (internal SATA) of the same Seagate drive slower than that but the same speeds, then IEEE1394a (Firewire 400) a tiny bit slower, and USB2 slower yet.

 

[corkyg]

Here is a real world measure of the use of eSATA with a laptop. Setup: eSATA PCMCIA card in Lenovo T60 w/200GB 7200 RPM HDD, and an external 200GB 7200RPM HDD in a NexStar 3 eSATA case. Mission: Using Acronis TI-11, clone the internal HDD to the eSATA external.

Time to complete the process = 31 minutes.

Change internal drives - replace the Lenovo drive with a second identical 200GB drive, and clone from the eSATA external to the T60 internal using the same TI-11 process. Time to complete the mission = 12 minutes!

Doing the same operation with external USB 2 takes over an hour. Firewire takes about 45 minutes.

My conclusion after doing this monthly for the past year and a half is that eSATA is well worth it.

What I really would like is to have an eSATA port on the laptop so I would not have to go through PCMCIA.

 

[mooseracing]

I get a sustained 60-80MB/s writes on Smansung F1 1TB droves on a Rosewill E-sata card with a P4. This tower is onyl used as a backup server at my work. The system can barely handle it(at it's max), as the whole thing becomes unresponsive when transferring files.

I would be willing to bet most newer e-sata setups would beat firewire.

 

[Lonyo]

Originally posted by: Paperdoc

Originally posted by: Blain

Originally posted by: Paperdoc
Speed of an external eSATA-connected drive is faster than USB2 and comparable to Firewire 400 (aka IEEE1394a).

eSATA is the same speed as internal SATA.
Firewire 1394a or 1394b are slower.

That's what the specs say for maximum burst tranmission rate. But for average sustained data transmission rates you need real-world testing. One set of such data, about two years old:

http://www.tomshardware.com/re...-drive-esata,1307.html

shows IEEE1394b (Firewire 800) fastest of all tested, eSATA and directly-connected (internal SATA) of the same Seagate drive slower than that but the same speeds, then IEEE1394a (Firewire 400) a tiny bit slower, and USB2 slower yet.

Um, SATA2 is pretty much certain to be faster than Firewire, all things equal.
In the tests you linked all things weren't equal though.