ESATA and RAID

[FatherJack]

I'm looking to extend my vast, cavernous storage yet further with some more external drives. USB ones are okay for backups, but a bit slow for live use and don't always appear in time on bootup.

So I'm looking to have a bit of ESATA connectivity, but wondered a few things.

These look a cheap and cheerful option for holding disks I change around. I have a USB-only version which I've been pretty happy with. These appear to come with an ESATA cable and claim to do SATA 300. I don't have any drives faster than 150MB/s at the moment, but being prepared is good. I'll look at some nicer, stackable enclosures later on.

I'm also looking for a PCI/PCI Express card with ESATA outputs. Not sure if PCI can deliver 300MB/s speed, but my spare PCI Express x1 sockets are in a very hot place. Again, just planning for the future, a new motherboard will be coming at some stage once I have a job.

Two external ESATA sockets minimum, four would be ideal. In-built RAID controller would be kind of nice as long as it didn't triple the price, but wouldn't really be worth it for less than five drives.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

I've heard eSATA was a bit clunky and generally a pain in the arse. not sure if that still holds true, but it's worth looking at. 2 port controllers can be had for £50-odd.

IIRC PCI is 133/266MB/s, which is probably a little tight for more than one fast drive. (though PCI-E 1x is 250MB/s, but meant to perform much better)


Personally, I'd be thinking more towards a USB 3.0 controller and USB 3.0 drives, they should be considerably faster than current stuff, while being backwards compatible if you do need to move them.

[FatherJack]

Should have been more clear about my current requirements, which are for cheap removable scratch drives using drives I already have, emphasis on cheap. Fairly easy to transport between any PC, even mouldy old ones but decent speed when they're connected to mine.

I don't see any USB 3 enclosures around, and the 1TB USB 3 drives are more than I was planning to spend in total.

I'll avoid RAID for now, so compatibility can be had by either pulling out the drive, connecting via a USB dock, or a pikey ESATA connector.

Looking at that pikey thing, they shouldn't be any clunkier than regular internal drives, but I want to keep them seperate from my onboard drives. Will try and find out other people's experiences with ESATA in general first though - what you said reminded me of my experiences with early firewire.

PCI may be okay speed-wise, but I'll have a look and see if I think I can fit a PCI-E behind the graphics card.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

if the slot above the GPU is clear, that should work, not much airflow goes on there anyway.