Modern motherboards which support the SATA hard drive standard either have an eSATA socket, or can have one fitted.
We’ve been eyeing the eSATA plug that shipped with the latest Bleeding Edge extravagance – built around the Asus P5B DeLuxe WiFi motherboard – with increasing interest. Last week, we finally succumbed. We knew that it would dramatically increase the speed of backups and file transfers, but we weren’t sure by how much.
Seagate recently proclaimed that its external eSATA drive was “up to five times faster” than USB 2.0 or Firewire 400 devices, with data jetting around at 3Gb per second. That’s nonsense. Although eSATA drives can technically transfer data at either 1.5Gigabits per second or 3Gbps, in practice they top out at 300MB per second, which is still quite an advance on the 133MBps limit for the old ATA bus
.External case manufacturers offer a range of speeds and connections with their eSATA units. We wanted the fastest possible transfer rates, so we chose two units, the Sarotech FHD-354US2 and the Welland Sun Bright ME-740J. Both have 3Gbps eSATA and USB 2.0 interfaces.
We tested the cases with the same 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 hard drive, which is the first generation of the company’s desktop hard drives to use its new Perpendicular Recording Technology to increase speed and storage capacity. The price had tumbled in the past couple of weeks, to the point where you can find them for as little as $240. They also have a new five-year warranty, although if something does go wrong in the final three years, the drives have to be shipped back to Singapore.
The first external hard drive we purchased, six years ago, was made by the Korean manufacturer, Sarotech, and it’s still performing quite happily. In terms of robustness, performance and packaging, we rate these cases at least as highly as LaCie drives. The FHD-354US2 met the usual Sarotech standards. Its aluminium housing was much more robust than the Welland’s, and unlike that drive, its power supply is embedded in the box. It also includes a well-made carry bag, and ships with an intelligent backup application, Intellistore LT. It is, however, substantially more expensive.
We found that it was slightly easier to assemble the Sarotech drive. With the Welland, we were at a loss to understand which end of the LED cable went where. Although there is a small manual in the Welland box, it seems to be aimed more at formatting of the drive. You’ll have to use the USB 2.0 interface to format your hard drive, rather than eSATA. Seagate’s free Disc Wizard offers some help with installation and preparation.
The Welland box includes a bracket that you can install in an empty expansion card slot and attach to an internal SATA port, to provide that alluring external connector. It’s a $16 optional extra with the Sarotech drive, although in our case, we didn’t need it. Both drives were exceptionally quiet, and seemed to manage the heat effectively.
We used an application called HDTach (available from tinyurl.com/rf85v ) to compare and measure the performance of the eSATA drives against both USB 2.0 and Firewire alternatives.
The results were impressive. The best average read time we could wring out of the drive in USB 2.0- mode was 31 MB/s, compared to 55.3MB/s from the internal Maxtor SATA drive.
Both the Sarotech and the Welland eSATA performance was substantially better than the internal hard drive, at 61MB/s.
In practical terms, that meant that we were able to transfer 19.7GB of data to the Sarotech and the Welland external drives in eSATA mode in just over six minutes. Using USB 2.0 on one of our other external hard drives, it took 13 minutes 35 seconds.
The Sarotech has an RRP of $199, available through the distributors at HipGizmos.com, although the street price is likely to be less than that. We’ve seen the Welland for as little as $60 on the Internet. It’s distributed by Anyware.com.au.