External Backup Drive: eSata vs. USB

Lennart Sorensen lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Fri Oct 5 19:07:28 UTC 2007


On Fri, Oct 05, 2007 at 12:36:03PM -0400, Kareem Shehata wrote:
> Just ran into a snag with the plan to backup to an external drive: the old
> MoBo on my dev/secondary server only has USB1.1 ports (it's an old MSI
> K7T266 Pro2, but hey it did the job for years).  So now the question is: do
> I grab a PCI SATA board (such as the ByteCC that Canada computers has on for
> $17), or grab a PCI USB2.0 adapter?

USB 2.0 will give you a transfer rate for your backup of about 30MB/s
maybe 35 in my experience.

I have seen many SATA drives doing 60 to 70MB/s so using eSATA should
give you twice the transfer speed in most cases.

On the other hand ALL systems support hotswap USB so as long as you
unmount first you can remove the drive.  SATA supports hotswap, but many
OSs don't support it yet.  Support for hot plugging of SATA is rather
new in linux, and only works on some controllers so far, so your results
may vary.

A USB 2.0 PCI card is also about $20, while a SATA card is probably $40.

The card you found is probably Sil3112a based, which is supported in
linux (although it dislikes some drives), and does support hotplug on
recent kernels apparently.  I haven't tried sata hotplug on linux so I
am not sure what steps are required when doing it if any.  The 3112 is a
rather old design and doesn't do command queueing or anything else newer
sata adds.

--
Len Sorensen
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