Look here for some interesting comparison of USB, 1394 and new eSATA external storage interconnect:
http://www.sata-io.org/esata.asp
Comments:
Not sure I totally agree with some of their benchmark graphs. First I see that although USB2 runs as 480MBps vs Firewire's 400Mbps, apparently the marshalling/unmarshalling of ATA requests is more expensive over USB and thus is lower than firewire? That doesn't make sense.
And they don't mention that Firewire is moving to 800Mbps soon and I believe USB2 is getting faster as well.
Its probably also worth it to note that it appears that the SATA and Ultra ATA drives are likely practically the same units. If you look at the datasheets on seagate.com, for example, its pretty apparent that the Baraccuda 7200.8 is the same no matter which interface. Albiet the maximum external transfer rate on the SATA version is 150Mbps vs 100Mbps for Ultra ATA. It seems like there is alot of headroom for bumps in external transfer speed from a external USB2 or Firewire drive before making the switch to yet another set of connectors.
SATA is moving fast toward GEN-2 signaling speed, i.e. 3Gbps. There are devices and controllers already on the market. That means that it will retain for a while its lead related to the interface speed. Not to mention Native Command Queueing feature that may not be easily useable over USB or 1394 (I am not sure of how would the protocol translation work).
Pawel
Posted by
pawelblog
on May 17, 2005 at 05:27 PM PDT
#
Not sure I totally agree with some of their benchmark graphs. First I see that although USB2 runs as 480MBps vs Firewire's 400Mbps, apparently the marshalling/unmarshalling of ATA requests is more expensive over USB and thus is lower than firewire? That doesn't make sense.
And they don't mention that Firewire is moving to 800Mbps soon and I believe USB2 is getting faster as well.
Its probably also worth it to note that it appears that the SATA and Ultra ATA drives are likely practically the same units. If you look at the datasheets on seagate.com, for example, its pretty apparent that the Baraccuda 7200.8 is the same no matter which interface. Albiet the maximum external transfer rate on the SATA version is 150Mbps vs 100Mbps for Ultra ATA. It seems like there is alot of headroom for bumps in external transfer speed from a external USB2 or Firewire drive before making the switch to yet another set of connectors.
Posted by watt on May 16, 2005 at 06:15 PM PDT #
Posted by pawelblog on May 17, 2005 at 05:27 PM PDT #