What the hell is eSATA and where can I get cable?

[Daniel ~]

Just received an external hard drive that uses eSATA, I have sata connectors (Never used SATA before this is all new to me) I thought all SATA used the same connections...I can't get my SATA cables to fit on to the thing! They fit my Motherboard nicely...? TIA!!

[Daniel ~]

BTW which is faster Firewire 400 or USB 2?

[MUff1N]

Really, I'm not familiar with it either so you're not alone & yes, the connectors are different!
(SATA (left) and eSATA (right) connectors in pic below)

So with that said read on... eSATA info

You can buy a cable to go from SATA to eSATA external drive @ Newegg.

ALL eSATA stuff at Newegg...

For putting a port on one of the back PCI slot covers of your case.
(pic below)

[Daniel ~]

Many thanks Muffin! I've ordered a Sata to eSata and an E to E...I think this should do the trick!":O}

(I'm giving the same answer else where as I mistakenly posted twice on this!
(What a noob! LOL

[MUff1N]

Originally Posted by Daniel ~

Many thanks Muffin! I've ordered a Sata to eSata and an E to E...I think this should do the trick!":O}

Yep, that will do the trick!

[Daniel ~]

I shouldn't need this...but I appreciate your reassurance! LOL

[Rondog]

No wonder you have such a high post count!! :P

Good luck with the endeavour.

[Daniel ~]

I'm not hurting your post count any either! ":O}

[booman]

Firewire= 400Mps
USB 2 = 480Mps
The newer Firewire IEEE-1934b has transfer rates of 800, 1600, 3100 Mbps

they are even devloping a USB 3.0

[Daniel ~]

eSATA 2000 Mps...you can see why a guy would want to move from USB 2.0 to e-SATA...":O}

[booman]

yeah, you are right. I didn't even think of that

[Daniel ~]

I'm just hoping I've avoided conflicts with my ATA drives by running them off PCI card instead of my one on board IDE

[booman]

Probably because an ATA expansion card is dedicated to the hard-drives as opposed to the onboard chip that has to compete with all the other onboard stuff.

[Daniel ~]

What I'm hoping! ":O}

[fantomfreq]

Originally Posted by booman

Firewire= 400Mps
USB 2 = 480Mps
The newer Firewire IEEE-1934b has transfer rates of 800, 1600, 3100 Mbps

they are even devloping a USB 3.0

In theory, USB 2.0 is faster than Firewire 400. However, in practice that rarely holds out to be true. The way that the two systems work lends FW better to large file transfers while USB might be a little faster than FW on multiple small files. Of course eSATA is way faster than either of those (though less mainstream) and should be the current interface of choice for the speed demons around here.

[booman]

You are probably right fantomfreq... Like with flash drives the read/write speeds vary. I've never used the Firewire port so I just posted the specs.

[Daniel ~]

Right now I'm spending around 5 1/2 hours to back up then verify using a sector by sector approach. I back up a 320 drive. I can live happily with this if I can't get it together with eSATA. I should have tried Sata a long time ago...thought it high time I did something in Sata! or at lest started trying to!":O}

[fantomfreq]

Originally Posted by Daniel ~

Right now I'm spending around 5 1/2 hours to back up then verify using a sector by sector approach. I back up a 320 drive. I can live happily with this if I can't get it together with eSATA. I should have tried Sata a long time ago...thought it high time I did something in Sata! or at lest started trying to!":O}

Just a suggestion: find a nice backup program. I've used one or two (albeit only on my Mac) that will do incremental backups, meaning that it will only write or change files that have been created or changed since the last backup. This brings down my backup times to 5-10 minutes instead of a couple hours.

[booman]

I use FWbackups on Fedora 8 and it works great. I have it backup selected files every day and then the whole computer once a week.

[Daniel ~]

Originally Posted by fantomfreq

Just a suggestion: find a nice backup program. I've used one or two (albeit only on my Mac) that will do incremental backups, meaning that it will only write or change files that have been created or changed since the last backup. This brings down my backup times to 5-10 minutes instead of a couple hours.

Good one! ":O}

I'm using Acronis as it backs up Fedora and several other favs of Linux as well as the Usual Windows group. The only limitation is that it requires a sector by sector to do a Linux back up that I'm not sure works with incremental back up...

But if it does it requires that I do the restore, then restore each incremental one at a time in order... to time consuming for me...LOL

You see I back up at night so as long as I get a good one not to much else matters as far as time to run, just time to set up...yes?":O}