ICY DOCK eSATA External 3.5'' Drive Enclosure

INTRODUCTION 

With high definition digital content, such as your collection of MP3s, digital home videos, downloaded movies, and TV shows, filling up the hard drive, soon you will find yourself in the position of needing more storage space. Most people will either buy an internal hard drive or buy an external hard drive that connects via USB or Firewire to add storage space. There are some disadvantages of both options: the internal installation would require some knowledge of installing computer components while the external option has a major disadvantage of transfer speed. USB 2.0 offers a theoretical transfer speed of 60MB/s and Firewire (IEEE 1394a) offers 100MB/s, but an internal hard drive offers up to 300MB/s. Today, we have a solution for the problem — external SATA (eSATA) storage. External SATA combines the simplicity of external storage yet retains the performance of internal storage.

eSATA vs SATA

SATA has been implemented primarily inside the desktop and more recently in laptops. The benefits of SATA are the higher bandwidth (300MB/s) and thinner cable. Because of these benefits, it has been recently adopted so that it can also be used with an external connector. eSATA is slowly being added to some of today’s high-end motherboards, such as the Asus A8N32-SLI. In order to use the eSATA, the system motherboard needs to have the eSATA connector, or you can buy an expansion card that basically will route the internal SATA externally. The eSATA connector is basically a shielded version of the internal SATA connector with a few differences:

• eSATA does not have the L-shaped connector found in SATA. Instead, it’s straight.
• The insertion depth of eSATA has been increased from 5.0mm to 6.6mm, and the contacts are mounted further back in both the receptacle and plug in order to reduce the ESD damage.
• The cable has an extra layer of shielding, and the connectors have metal contact points in order to provide EMI protection and meet FCC and CE emission requirements
• The maximum length of the cable has been increased from 1m to 2m
• A retention mechanism has been implemented in the connector.

SATA connector (left) and eSATA connector (right).

As a note, there are some motherboards, such as DFI’s LanParty, that come with expansion adapters that route internal SATA to external. However, the connector is still the L-shaped internal SATA, not eSATA. Therefore, you will not be able to use these connectors with eSATA drives.