eSATA interface worth the money ?

Storm · 14 Jul 2007 at 13:39

Hi All,

I'm looking for an external hard drive to run as my main work storage, plugged into my laptop (Dell XPS M1710). I'm gonna be using the hard drive for video editing, animations and other graphics stuff so would like it to be fast.

I'm 99% going to get the Seagate FreeAgent Pro 500GB 7200rpm 16MB USB2 / Firewire 400 / eSATA drive which I've found for £115 inc vat and delivery, but just wanted to check something about eSATA and Firewire.

I'm assuming that eSATA will give me the fastest performance, but with it being an external hard drive am I going to notice the difference. I've seen a 2 Port eSATA Expresscard Adapter for £38 inc vat and delivery. Would I notice the extra performance or would I be wasting an extra £38.

If it would be a waste of money I'd probably look at the same Seagate drive but just the USB2 version (though 8mb cache instead of 16mb) which I've found for £85 inc vat and delivery.

Thanks for any advice in advance,
Storm

helmutcheese · 14 Jul 2007 at 14:22

Well eSATA is fastest way to do it, Giglan is next, then both 1394a and USB2.

mosfet · 14 Jul 2007 at 15:10

An eSATA drive on the PCIe bus will as fast as, if not faster than, your internal drive. You'll definitely notice the speed increase above USB and IEEE1394a.

If you've got a 1394b/Firewire 800 port on your laptop then that's another option, but eSATA is the way to go.

jbloggs · 14 Jul 2007 at 17:09

Using eSATA with a 320GB SATA 7200.10 in an Icy Box external enclosure in HDTach I get an Average read of 68MB/s (exactly what I would get if installed as internal HDD), over USB2 in HDTach also, I get an Average read of 32MB/s...hopefully that will give you some idea of transfer rates.

james.miller · 14 Jul 2007 at 17:12

estat will be as fast as a sata drive would be internally. thats all it is at the end of the day - a sata connection. totally worth it

helmutcheese · 14 Jul 2007 at 17:25

If the eSata is on the PCI-E bus as above user said, if its on the older PCI bus its bottleneck is 133MB/Sec shared with other devices.

ByteJuggler · 14 Jul 2007 at 17:33

helmutcheese said:
If the eSata is on the PCI-E bus as above user said, if its on the older PCI bus its bottleneck is 133MB/Sec shared with other devices.

yes... but for a single drive that's generally irrelevant since no single consumer disk can sustain anywhere near 133MB/sec (except perhaps extreme high end 15,000 rpm disks which you don't find in SATA form or external enclosures) , so it doesn't actually matter if the e-Sata controller is PCI or PCI-e for a single disk.

helmutcheese · 14 Jul 2007 at 17:50

Correct apart from burst rate from buffer which will be near 300MB/Sec on a SATA300 drive, wont matter as you said, but you can buy Raid0 external HDD's I think WD I-book have one.