USB vs Esata

[Niku]

A coworker of mine is telling me that USB has higher data transfer rates. I never would have thought that was true. For the use of "hot swapping" external hard drives, would i be better off with USB or Esata for raw movement of data and access of the drives for work as well?

 

[RebateMonger]

eSATA is considerably faster. And USB is more convenient. Typically, I'll see 25MB/sec on USB 2.0 and 70 MB/sec on SATA. These numbers will vary, but you get the general idea.

Ideally, get a housing that will do both, so you can choose depending on what ports are available on your PC/server.

 

[DarkRogue]

USB can not be faster than eSATA; there's just no way. USB tops out at 40mb/s or so, but realistically, due to overhead, it'd max out around 30-35mb/s. eSATA is simply an external interface for the internal SATA standard (as far as I understand it) and runs at the same speeds as regular SATA, so max theoretical of 300 mb/s, although you're limited by your hard drive in this case, so for mechanical drives, anywhere between 70-100ish mb/s.

As RebateMonger said, get an enclosure that does both. I have 2 Icy Dock MB664 enclosures that have both USB and eSATA (and completely tool-less!), and they work like a charm. I use eSATA for max bandwidth with my PC, and I keep the USB cable in my bag for when I need to travel with it and my laptop.

 

[Niku]

So, just to be perfectly clear. There are not variable factors in the whole Esata thing that make it theoretically faster. You know, the whole "on paper" thing, but USB is practically faster? I have to order this thing for a friend, and i am going to be questioned when i do. One of those "Well, WHY didnt you listen to MY idea" situations.

 

[VirtualLarry]

USB is the slowest external HD interface in existance.

 

[n7]

I'd suggest Wikipedia; lots of good info to be read.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usb

Absolute maximum speed for the USB 2.0 interface is 480 Mb/s (60 MB/s).

In actuality, you will see 30-40 MB/s transfer speeds at most, never anywhere close to 60 MB/s.

"SATA1" does 1500 Mb/s, or more accurately, 1200 Mb/s (150 MB/s).
"SATA2" does 3000 Mb/s, or more accurately, 2400 Mb/s (300 MB/s).

USB isn't remotely in the same performance category as the slowest eSATA.

 

[RU482]

was he speaking of USB 3.0, perhaps?

 

[abudalow]

eSata just like external sata
USB 2.0 can't be faster than eSata

 

[taltamir]

eSATA is much faster AND it reduces overhead...
even if you were to use USB3 (which is an order of magnitude faster than than USB2, and 30% faster than eSATA gen2... but slower than eSATA gen3) you would be better off with eSATA... why? e/SATA gen1,2 and 3, and USB3 are all faster than the max transfer rate of any spindle drive (but not every SSD), but the SATA / eSATA interface reduces the overhead and conversions compared to USB and would result in an overall faster speed (although not significant).

 

[Niku]

He was talking USB 2. I'm not sure what he was smoking. He stated some weird scenario that to him meant USB was faster. Some thing about Esata not being as fast as people thought. I said "but, isnt Esata tied in to a 3.0 Gb/s bus?" and he said it was just the theoretical max and that hard drives couldn't actually do it because they had moving parts. To which i said "then why do my files transfer from internal HDDs faster then they do to external HDDs? To which he started saying some thing that made my head explode in to candy. It smacked of "wrong" Which I knew form my own observations, and i didn't have data to back it up. You data helps me with my own decision. Thanks every one.

 

[taltamir]

ok, he just has no idea what he is talking about

And btw it is 3.0 gb/s not Gb or GB. specifically, gigabit. that means 3 billion bits. a byte is 8 bits. and there is some overhead. So overall realistic speed is 300 mega bytes per second for it.
SATA gen 1 is 1.5 gb/s
SATA gen 2 is 3.0 gb/s
SATA gen 3 is 6.0 gb/s

while it is true that most hard drives can not reach that speed, they can easily outpace the 40 MB/s max of USB2. And the drives directly output data in SATA format. eSATA is really the same as SATA, its just on the outside. (you can use a SATA to eSATA cable because they are pin compatible)
External drives have a SATA drive connected to a controller which needs to convert it to USB. It is much easier to just forward the connect as is via eSATA.

so to sum it up:
1. skip the conversion, and you speed up the process.
2. SATA is much faster than USB2
3. USB2 is actually slow enough to limit the drive, eSATA isn't

 

[DarkRogue]

a bit is 8 bytes.

I believe you have it slightly backwards; a byte is 8 bits. Otherwise, 3 billion bits would become 24 billion bytes instead of 375 million bytes, lol.

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

I have a Vantec Hard drive dock that supports both eSATA and USB. I generally only use the USB side however, because windows doesn't like me hot swapping SATA drives.

 

[fffblackmage]

It's too bad esata isn't very popular. USB is convenient since it's everywhere, but slooooow. At least it's fast enough I can stream videos off them I guess.

 

[cmdrdredd]

The problem I have with eSATA is that I cannot seem (in Win7 anyway) to plug a drive in and have it pop up in the my computer window. USB works that way and I can "eject" it and unplug it on the fly. I wish eSATA worked that way on Win7 and I've tried everything. It's either plugged in all the time, or I use USB instead.

 

[rcpratt]

I believe that AHCI has to be enabled (and windows must be installed with it) for hotswapping SATA to work.

 

[cmdrdredd]

I believe that AHCI has to be enabled (and windows must be installed with it) for hotswapping SATA to work.

Both have been done and it doesn't function.

 

[RebateMonger]

Both have been done and it doesn't function.

That's why eSATA has only been a moderate success. Too many people have problems getting it to work. At this point, unless Intel screws it up, I expect USB 3.0 to quickly overtake eSATA for external disk use.

I'm surprised that the entire SATA/eSATA thing seems so problematic considering how many years passed between the development of IDE and SATA. The connectors are fragile, no locking mechanism is standard, and eSATA should work like USB and, many times, doesn't.

 

[cmdrdredd]

I just wish I could plug a drive in to eSATA and have it show up and eject it when I'm done.

 

[IlllI]

nobody likes firewire anymore?

 

[Blain]

nobody likes firewire anymore?

Mac users do.

 

[taltamir]

I believe you have it slightly backwards; a byte is 8 bits. Otherwise, 3 billion bits would become 24 billion bytes instead of 375 million bytes, lol.

I can't beleive I actually wrote that... yes a byte is 8 bits. Sorry, I was really tired when I typed it out.

 

[Nebor]

I just wish I could plug a drive in to eSATA and have it show up and eject it when I'm done.

When SATA first came out they were constantly touting it's hot swapability.

 

[RebateMonger]

nobody likes firewire anymore?

Firewire would have done better against USB 2.0, but politics/legal issues got involved and usable Windows drivers for Firewire 800 controllers were never freely distributed.

There wasn't THAT big an advantage of Firewire 400 over USB 2.0, and the scarcity of built-in Firewire jacks on motherboards and the Firewire 800 driver issue mostly killed Firewire for Windows.

 

[exar333]

eSATA drives are nice too because they operate the exact same to the system as an internal drive.

I have not yet tried hot-swapping eSATA drives in Win7, but I never had issues with doing this in Vista as long as ACHI was enabled.