eSATA or Gigabit Network

NickM · 2 Mar 2011 at 20:09

I'm looking to get a 4 drive enclosure to keep my backup drives in. I already have an old-ish gigabit NAS with some smaller drives in so I have 2 options:

1. Just replace the drives in my current NAS (but then I'd need something else to put these in).

2. Buy an USB2/eSATA enclosure.

I'd prefer them to be network attached but if USB2/eSATA will give faster transfer speeds then I'll go with that.
I was going to buy one which came with drives and had both eSATA and network but they only offer certain capacities (I want to leave one bay empty for future expansion) and are fairly expensive!
So the question is, which will give faster transfer speeds (all other things being equal), eSATA or gigabit network?

DragonQ · 2 Mar 2011 at 20:26

eSATA = 3 Gbps (usually)
Gigabit ethernet = 1 Gbps, obviously
USB 2.0 = 480 Mbps

rpstewart · 2 Mar 2011 at 20:28

You'll need to spend a fair amount of cash to get a NAS which is capable of delivering decent speeds over gigabit, the cheap ones don't have the grunt to do it.

eSATA on the other hand doesn't need any processing power in the enclosure and hence you'll get the full drive speed from pretty much any enclosure.

NickM · 2 Mar 2011 at 22:08

Hmm okay. By cheap how much do you mean? I was looking at the LaCie 5big which is £650 for 5TB, is that considered cheap for a NAS (say £250 for the drives that means that actual enclosure is around £400)? The LaCie website claims

Fast access to your NAS—Performance up to 70MB/s*.
*Tests performed using IOZone tool in SMB file systems. PC used: Core2 Duo 2 Ghz /1 GB RAM / Network card RealTek / Crossed cable / XP Professional for 64KB I/O, Vista Professional for 1MB I/O. Performance depends on file system used, file size, and may vary from one drive to another.

Which seems pretty fast for a network connection, plus it has eSATA as well so for the first initial backup and any particularly large backup afterwards that would be useful.

Phemo · 2 Mar 2011 at 23:00

I'd say £650 for a 5TB NAS is excessive. My NAS box loaded up with 8TB worth of drives (4x2TB) would cost under £550 and it's in fact a PC so is more flexible anyway, as well as actually having the grunt to give full speed gigabit network transfers. At the time I put it together the components not including the hard drives cost about £280. Also with it being an Atom-based box the power consumption is nice and low too.

See the post I made here a little while ago. If you can be bothered with the minutes it takes to screw the motherboard into the case and pop a stick of RAM in then slot the HDs in, that's a much better option in my opinion.

Zarf · 2 Mar 2011 at 23:14

ESATA are better speeds, but Ethernet is more flexible.
HP Microservers are back on offer, ~£120 after cashback. Grab one of those, stick 4 or 5 2TB drives in and run freenas or similar from a usb stick (there's even an internal usb port specially for this). As a bonus it has plenty of grunt for running services (Torrents, music , ventrillo etc)

For the price they can't be beaten. Speed wise the linux -> windows isn't the best, but you'll see around 60MB/s. If you run a windows OS on the microserver you can go over 100MB/s to windows clients, which is pretty close to the transfer limit of a single 2TB 5400 rpm drive.

NickM · 6 Mar 2011 at 05:55

Thanks Phemo, custom build seems like a good idea. Not too keen on the Chenbro ES34069 case though, are there any better looking ones?

edit: I also read that its quite noisy, how do you find the noise from the fans/drives?