5punk

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.

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.

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.

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