External Backup Drive: eSata vs. USB

Giles Orr gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Fri Oct 5 19:46:34 UTC 2007


On 10/5/07, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 05, 2007 at 12:36:03PM -0400, Kareem Shehata wrote:
> > 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?
>
> 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.

This is the same card (and the same vendor!) that I bought.  As
Lennart so succintly puts it, "it dislikes some drives."  I think a
lot of people are using it without problems, but look at my posts
about SATA issues to see why you might not want to buy a card with
that particular chipset.

While USB is probably slower than eSATA, I'd still second the vote for
USB: if it's a machine that you use for testing, you're going to want
reasonable USB speeds out of it for other things as well.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
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