Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1556 mails)

[Tejas Guruswamy <masterpatricko@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 03/02/10 09:52, Sampsa Riikonen wrote:
> What seems to be the problem?  Am I missing something in the math?
> My external usb hard disk box has also an option to use an esata connector
> (but then I should buy an adaptor to my laptop), but the speed difference
> to usb 2.0 is not that big, I imagine..?
>   
ESATA has a capacity of 3Gbits/sec vs USB2.0's 480Mbits/sec. In fact
with ESATA the choke point is usually the read speed of the drive, not
the bus speed. The disadvantage is that your computer must have a ESATA
port (desktops can fit an expansion card into a PCI-Express slot, but
it's difficult on laptops) and also ESATA doesn't carry power.

Tom's Hardware recently had an article[1] comparing the speeds of
USB2.0, Firewire800, and ESATA and found a clear difference. For
instance using a 1TB Hitachi G-Drive they were getting 100MBytes/sec
read speeds on ESATA vs 35MBytes/sec on USB2.0.

After saying all this though, USB3.0 at 4.8Gbits/sec will be introduced
over the next few years.

Regards,
Tejas

[1] http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/usb-firewire-esata,review-31793-8.html
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