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 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org