Hi guys hope you can help me get my drive connected. Have bought a Seagate FreeAgent Pro 500GB USB2.0/eSATA/Firewire External Hard Drive, which i've currently got connected by firewire to my pc, but I want to go with eSATA. What is the best way? I've currently got 4 hard drives connected to my DS3 board via the ICH8 southbridge, so it only leaves me the 2 GIGABYTE sata connectors free. If I use one of these, will I have to change any settings in the BIOS, and also will it support hot plugging? Or shall I just invest in a PCI card, like the LaCie 2-Port eSATA 3Gbits/s PCI-Express (x1) Card? Will this support hot plugging as well?
Best way of connecting new external drive
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best of luck my money is on the free agent cooking its self before you do anything with it...mine did
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MeatLoaf said:
A few points:
1.) There is not really a practical performance difference between IDE/ATA and SATA drives. (Original SATA drives were in fact PATA drives with a PATA to SATA converter onboard... to stress the point - the original Raptor was indeed such a disk, and despite this was at the time one of the fastest consumers disks around. It is a mistake to think that a PATA drive will neccesarily be slower (in practice) than the same drive with a SATA interface.)
2.) Both IDE and SATA I has a substantially higher theoretical throughput rate than firewire (133MB/sec, ~150MB/sec and ~40MB/sec respectively.) It therefore stands to reason from that point of view also that eSATA is a better bus to use regardless of whether you might have an IDE drive at the other end of it. (Firewire 800 improves this to ~80MB/sec or so, but is very very rare.)
3.) Most hard disks today (whether SATA or IDE/PATA) sustains around 65-85Mb/sec. This is well beyond what firewire can carry at peak, but well within what SATA/eSATA can carry.
Consequently I disagree with your comment and would always opt for eSATA given the choice. Chances are it should improve performance rather than hinder it. (Ideally just make sure your controller supports hot plugging, but then, if it states support for *e-Sata* then by implication you'd expect there to be support for hotplugging anyway...)
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rocketman said:
Well the description says it supports hot-plugging...
It would be a good option if the onboard controller does not support e-Sata. Check in you motherboard manual if it supports e-Sata or not.
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Have a look in your motherboard box, some motherboards come with an esata pci bracket, that leaches off the onboard sata.
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rocketman said:Motherboard is Gigabyte DS3 revision 2, so no support for eSATALooks like the lacie card is my best bet.....
Just a note: If you can get a PCI e-sata bracket, you can still connect it to your onboard SATA connector even if it doesn't neccesarily support hot-plugging officially, the only thing is you won't be able to/shouldn't hot-plug the external hard drive (e.g. you should connect it prior to powering on your PC and disconnect it after shutdown.) Other than that there's no problem using an external disk via an e-Sata external enclosure. I'm doing this on my 3 year old Asus K8V and it's onboard Promise controller, which I don't believe officially supports hot-plugging, using a PCI e-sata bracket I received with my Iqon external 500GB enclosure with E-Sata and USB2.0 ports. So, that *might* be an option for you, perhaps. That said, that PCI-E Lacie card sounds like a better idea in general though.