eSATA anyone using it yet?

One of my mates in the office has one but he's just using it with his laptop so not making any use of the eSATA functionality.
It's a Vantec Nexstar 3, nice enclosure but don't know what he's running inside it. I'm thinking of getting one myself.
 
I've been wondering about this myself, a lot of the boards I am using atm feature eSata ports on the back. I'm just looking for a simple way to connect a drive outside the case so that I can format it.

What would I need then? Just an external SATA hard disk enclosure and the right cable?

Was also wondering if I could do this without buying the external enclosure but not sure how the drive would get its power?
 
You'll need an external casing which supports eSATA connection and an eSATA cable.

eSATA cable is different from the internal SATA cable.

The external enclosure is powered and it powers the hdd, not from the eSATA cable.
 
matja said:
What a rubbish design decision not to have power on the same cable.
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To a point I agree but you open up a whole can of worms by putting power in the same cable. How much and at what voltages for a start - do you allow enough for a 3.5" HDD or just limit it to enough for 2.5" HDDs? You then have to design boards and cards to supply the power to the ports.

It would be a nice feature but ultimately what percentage of eSATA devices will be truely mobile?
 
I on occassions connect via eSATA using an Icy Box External Enclosure IB-360AStUS SATA + USB Combo, with a Seagate Barracuda 320GB SATA 7200.10 HDD (connected in IB by SATA connection), connected to motherboard (Asus P5WDG2 WS Pro) via eSATA cable (which as already stated is slightly from ordinary SATA cable), I get the full transfer rate, in HDTach Average read 68MB/s (as compared to USB2 which would give me 35MB/s Average read). :)
 
rpstewart said:
To a point I agree but you open up a whole can of worms by putting power in the same cable. How much and at what voltages for a start - do you allow enough for a 3.5" HDD or just limit it to enough for 2.5" HDDs? You then have to design boards and cards to supply the power to the ports.

It would be a nice feature but ultimately what percentage of eSATA devices will be truely mobile?
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Just a SATA data/power to eSATA (with power) convertor would do. Instead of two cables you have one. They could have made little convertors that fit in a back panel that you just plug a sata data/power cable into and have eSATA (with power) coming out the back. But no. That would be too useful and convenient.
 
icybox 360 with sata connector is the way to go, it has a bracket that fits into your case (where a pci card would go etc) that plugs into an internal sata port

so you can use an sata drive in the icybox at full speed :), the 360's are awesome build quality compared to the old 35x range too
 
bledd. said:
icybox 360 with sata connector is the way to go, it has a bracket that fits into your case (where a pci card would go etc) that plugs into an internal sata port

so you can use an sata drive in the icybox at full speed :), the 360's are awesome build quality compared to the old 35x range too
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Technically speaking, that's still sata.

I have the same IB but with a different cable going into the back of a p5wd2e (has an esata port on the i/o area)

Really does irritate me the way they changed the connector just for external connections, the revised sata connector with locking clips is still better imo.
 
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