- i.e. native SATA hard drives in external enclosures with a native SATA interface.
Products like this drive and this interface seem to be appearing, using the "approved" external connector for SATA. Obviously, eSATA is intended as a candidate to replace (and surpass) USB2 and FireWire, with increased speed, hot-swappability and (presumeably) low cost connections and native SATA drives in external cases, without bridges to unnecessary intermediate interfaces.
Is this the way of the future?
I think the idea is good
but
If all sata drives are as bad as my first personal purchase of a sata drive , i'd not be happy with them in an external case.
My wd1600 , 160GB drive , has lasted less than 4 months before
1. losing connection to any sata port periodically
2. suddenly giving 'data could not be written'
3. disappearing from available harddrive list until pc is rebooted.
so , simple reformat it
it reformats to 22% if you do a full format , or , if you do a format using wd tools , it manages a 100% format
then within 5 minutes ...... it disappeared , and wouldn't come back online even after a reboot ( or three )
drive is now totally dead.
It can't be the sata controller as the main drive in the pc is still fine.
The spare 120GB pide is ok , so i don't think it's a 'no of drives' problem.
To balance this, our edit suite uses a SATA based RAID array (three disks) and is hammered all day every day without, to date, a single problem (8 months). I have to say I've not come across any trend of the nature that SATA disks are less reliable than EIDE.
Having said that, I'd always prefer to have my live projects on the internal arrays and only use external drives for backup/archiving so Firewire (esp. 800) is fine for that. Since my external drives are both FW and USB compatible it also means I can theretically pick one up and take it anywhere with a very good chance of finding a FW or USB to plug it into at the other end, not something you'd be able to say (in the short term) about eSATA.
Jon
I think the idea is goodbut
If all sata drives are as bad as my first personal purchase of a sata drive , i'd not be happy with them in an external case.
My wd1600 , 160GB drive , has lasted less than 4 months before
1. losing connection to any sata port periodically
2. suddenly giving 'data could not be written'
3. disappearing from available harddrive list until pc is rebooted.so , simple reformat it
it reformats to 22% if you do a full format , or , if you do a format using wd tools , it manages a 100% format
then within 5 minutes ...... it disappeared , and wouldn't come back online even after a reboot ( or three )
drive is now totally dead.
It can't be the sata controller as the main drive in the pc is still fine.
The spare 120GB pide is ok , so i don't think it's a 'no of drives' problem.
Good God, don't say that Gary! We reicently bought a RAID with 50 odd 250Gb Maxtor SATA drives fitted. And we have just spent £50,000 on another :eek:
I shall keep my fingers crossed, errr and toes, and everything else.
Sorry , but I've never had any other type of hard-drive commit suicide so quickly , even amstrads notorious hard-drives lasted longer.
When i say the drive is dead .... i mean dead ...... it is seen by bios on bootup , but doesn't appear to spin the platters or allow read access/formating
may be a temperature problem ..... i don't know , all i know is that i lost many hours of work , it is all spread across three PC's , but rebuilding 100+GB of data was hard enough once , without having to do the same again.
the drive is going back to the retailer tomorrow ( if i go into town ) or Monday , and I'll see what they say , must admit the drive didn't work when first connected , but did after a reboot , so maybe was temperamental from beginning.
Just my luck at the moment .................
Gary, do you suspect these problems are in any way related to, or caused by, SATA (internal or external), or just co-incidence?
Until someone looks at the disk , i have no clue.
The main drive is sata ( 300GB ) so i can't see it being sata itself , nor drivers , but i tried the 'bad drive' on two of the spare sata connectors.
ALL i know is the disk is dead .... as a doornail ..... and as such f*****g useless , never mind the work i haven't been able to do over the last week , which was all for myself , and the files i need are locked at work until monday morning.
If i/we find out what it is , i'll inform you ( even if it is me just being stupid )
Since my external drives are both FW and USB compatible it also means I can theretically pick one up and take it anywhere with a very good chance of finding a FW or USB to plug it into at the other end, not something you'd be able to say (in the short term) about eSATA.
the same was true of my firewire drive when i bought it just over 5 years ago, but i suppose at the time there was no alternative.
i suppose the main advantage of SATA over USB2 particularly is that it's designed specifically for hard drives. Hopefully this will result in high sustained data rates rather than just the burst that you get with USB.
i must say that i've been using SATA drives for over a year now with no problems at all.
Does anyone know what cable length restrictions there are?
mark.
Good point, Mark - I wonder if SATA (or eSATA) is OK for video - i.e. streaming data like FireWire, or more akin to "bursty" USB? Anyone?
I have seen mention of 2m for SATA cable length limits, but I don't know how "official" that is, or whether it varies with speed.
Yep I would say bursty. That is why they put soo much cache on them. The SATA disks we have, have 16MB cache :eek: That is a huge amount. We have checked them and for small amounts of data they are very fast, but after a period of time the do slow down. SCSI is still the fastest option over ATA disks.
However probably because of the large number we are using it is ok. We are using them in a system that is recording 10+ streams of video of 2MB/Sec each, and any number of streams playing back, but theoretically probably no more that 15 at any time. There are also file transfers going on in the background archiving off to DVD and back the other way, so we could be talking of over 100MB/Sec at times.
I wouldn't see a single SATA disk having problems with streaming over firewire, it would be more than fast enough for a couple of streams of DV.