e-SATA; Common in industry?

[Bauzi]

Hey there,

I heard that FireWire it is really common in industry and media related hardware like cameras, but... What about e-SATA? Isn't it common and highly used too? I mean as far as I know it's fast than FireWire 800 so I'm very curious about it.

[NeoQuixotic]

Well since e-SATA is just an external SATA connection, I've really only seen it used on external hard drives and optical drives. Performance wise for your standard external hard drive, e-SATA is only slightly better than FireWire 800, but if you were using a large multi-drive RAID box, then e-SATA will be much better. Also, finding FireWire 800 on a computer other than an Apple is rare. You can of course buy an internal or external card, but having it built in is always nice. I've seen e-SATA being put in an increasing majority of notebooks and desktops now. I myself prefer to use e-SATA for my external drives just to make sure it is as fast as possible. I also buy external drives that have USB 2.0, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, and e-SATA so I have all the connections I could possibly need. I like the LaCie Quadra and Western Digital My Book Studio external hard drives (they have all 4 connections); they get classified as Mac drives on some sites/stores because they come preformatted for Macs (usually FAT 32 to work on both PC and Mac), but a quick format fixes that.

The only downside I have with e-SATA is the cable and connector are generally not very flexible and the end connector can be prone to breaking with constant plugging in and out. Some vendors have tried to improve this. I personally haven't had the connector break, but reading online many people have.

[BasharOfTheAges]

Aside - SATA 3 (6 Gbps) will be making an appearance soon as the standard was ratified a few months back. You're going to need SSDs to use the throughput though.

[kholaras]

While you may see them at the consumer level being used for similar things (say, external harddrive enclosures), the technologies that implement e-SATA vs Firewire are totally different. e-SATA is a way to connect drives, that's it. It's great for external enclosures since you get all the performance benefits of an internally mounted drive and the portability without having to screw around with those stupid drive sleds.

Firewire can be used to get pretty fast connections to an external drive (theoretically USB is faster unless you're using Firewire 800, but it has a higher overhead and in practice comes out to be about the same either way) but it is usable for much more, especially in multimedia devices. Firewire's actually much more applicable for these systems because it is capable of isochronous transfers, ensuring that you have enough bandwidth to offload video from a video camera in realtime without having to worry about losing frames. USB bandwidth can be problematic and is prone to being fought over if you have a lot or a bad mix of devices.

[Bauzi]

While you may see them at the consumer level being used for similar things (say, external harddrive enclosures), the technologies that implement e-SATA vs Firewire are totally different. e-SATA is a way to connect drives, that's it.

Yeah that makes sense. I didn't thought about it. Do harddrive cameras have e-SATA?

Firewire can be used to get pretty fast connections to an external drive (theoretically USB is faster unless you're using Firewire 800, but it has a higher overhead and in practice comes out to be about the same either way) but it is usable for much more, especially in multimedia devices. Firewire's actually much more applicable for these systems because it is capable of isochronous transfers, ensuring that you have enough bandwidth to offload video from a video camera in realtime without having to worry about losing frames. USB bandwidth can be problematic and is prone to being fought over if you have a lot or a bad mix of devices.

That's hot. What I also like about FireWire: Set up drives and hardware in a row. Like... if you only have one FireWire plug on your system you can connect external drives like the My Book Studio Edition from Western Digital with FireWire together and you can still access all drives. That's really nice.