USB 3.0 no faster then eSata

[13Gigatons]

Don't need to wait for USB 3.0 to speed up your hard drive speeds, the transfer rates are about the same. Of course you will need SSD or RAID to reach these speeds.

Source: http://www.hardware.info/en-US/news/ymick5qYwpqaaJY/IDF08_USB_30_demonstration/

 

[Rubycon]

ESATA is a PIA compared to the PnP of USB. USB3.0 will only get faster, right now it's in its infancy! Having a bunch of disks sitting on the desk that can be plugged/unplugged without doing anything to the host PC AND have speeds the same as being hitched to the motherboard just rules!

 

[13Gigatons]

What problems are you having with eSata?

If the motherboard and drive are hot swap capable then everything should work fine.

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

Light Peak

 

[13Gigatons]

I'm rather doubtful that light peak will be used at the consumer level for few years.

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

Yeah but the specs on it are amazing. Hopefully it'll go well for Intel.

 

[Rubycon]

What problems are you having with eSata?

If the motherboard and drive are hot swap capable then everything should work fine.

Convenience. USB3 will be as convenient as 2 and 1.1 with the speed of the native HDD interface! ESATA has to be enabled on the board and drivers loaded for the controller whereas USB3 will be universally available. That's where it really shines.

 

[Red Squirrel]

esata is only really good for for home/soho servers mostly, you can connect an external drive enclosure through it for example. It's more or less meant for a permanent setup, or semi permanent (removable storage for backups).

 

[corkyg]

eSATA is my mainstay for external storage of data and backup. It is especially useful for cloning my laptop drives. The real world time difference in that operation is 12 minutes vs. 1 hour for USB 2.

USB 3 will make that easier, assuming that a new laptop will have USB 3 ports. Then I won't have to use an Express card for eSATA.

 

[Golgatha]

Yeah, I have an eSATA combo port on my new laptop, so there is nothing else to install in regards to expansion cards. The only difference in USB and eSATA for me is that I need 2 cables (power from a free USB port ironically enough, and data) for eSATA on my laptop. The hot plug feature seems to work just fine for me though, so in that respect there is no advantage to using USB. I bought a 0.5M eSATA cable from Monoprice to keep the cabling tidy too. I don't think saving carrying a cable around is enough to warrant buying an Express card or a new laptop.

If I'm on the go, I can clone to the eSATA drive, but at home I just clone over GbE to a network share. GbE gets around 40MB/sec sustained transfer, which is fine since my laptop drive is only 37GB of data. USB 2.0 cloning does seem painfully slow in comparison though, even though theoretically it should be able to do that kind of speed.