We gathered five eSATA hard drives, perfect for data backups and portability, and pitted them against each other with performance tests. In doing so, we also exposed the gap between eSATA and USB 2.0, since each drive is also capable of the latter. eSATA is becoming a common connector on the backs of motherboards everywhere. Even if your system's motherboard doesn't have an eSATA connector on the I/O panel, you can often pipe internal SATA ports right through the case.Check it out over here.
SATA has already reached its second outing (SATA-II has double the burst rate of the original SATA spec), but it's backward compatible so you can plug a SATA-II drive into a SATA-I port or vice versa. Most eSATA ports are SATA-II, with a 300GB/second burst rate, far outreaching USB 2.0's data rate of 480MB/s.
eSATA HDDs tested
Posted on Monday, August 27 2007 @ 2:15 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
ExtremeTech tested five eSATA drives from Cavalry, Iomega, LaCie, Seagate and Western Digital. These drives offers vastly more performance than their USB 2.0 counterparts.