External Backup Drive: eSata vs. USB

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Oct 05, 2007 at 03:46:34PM -0400, Giles Orr wrote:
> 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.

For newer machines (those with PCIe slots) there are pretty cheap
JMicron based SATA cards with either internal or external SATA ports,
which seem to be supported by linux (haven't tried one yet myself
though).  The jmicron is AHCI compliant which is considered the best way
to do SATA since it is an open standard now supported by most chipset
makers (all new intel chips use it, as does nvidia, and many others).

Unfortunately other PCI cards like the Promise TX2300 may not work any
better than the Sil3112a.  Not sure.  I have a promise 20378 based card
which works quite well, but the TX2300 is based on the 20771 I believe,
which I can't find much info on.  It is listed as supported in
sata_promise though so that may mean it is actually a decent choice,
although the ports are internal and you would have to use an adapter
bracket to get an external port.  On the other hand the linux driver
support currently lists the promise driver as NOT supporting hotplug,
while listing the sil as supporting hotplug, so that part sucks for the
promise cards.

The sil24 cards (sil3124 based) are listed as very well supported cards.
Not sure who makes one though.  I guess something like this:
http://www.extreme-pc.ca/showproduct.asp?productid=370930

http://cgi.ebay.ca/NEW-4-X-INTERNAL-SATA-II-PORT-PCI-X-RAID-CARD-W-SIL3124_W0QQitemZ170154060511QQihZ007QQcategoryZ39968QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

http://www.directcanada.com/products/?sku=15850BD9006&vpn=SD-SATA2-2E2I&manufacture=Syba

The first one looks pretty nice actually.  If I was to buy an sata card
right now that one would probably be it.

--
Len Sorensen
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