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* Posts by Paul

3 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Aug 2007

Is eSATA really better than USB 2.0 and Firewire?

Paul

Re: Title

"I have all three types of external drives attached to my computer so I just ran a brief test ... here's the result:

USB 2.0 Burst - 29 MB/sec ... Avg 29 MB/sec

FW Burst - 40 MB/sec ... Avg 40 MB/sec

eSATA Burst - 115MB/sec ... Avg 58 MB/sec (this is a SATA 1 drive)

eSATA is clearly superior in all respects.

One of the advantages of eSATA is that is is not seen as a removable device by NT based O/Ses and you can easily install your O/S on an eSATA drive."

I think you'll find Burst rate is dragging that average up misleadingly. And the USB result looks to be flawed in some way, just tested my 2.5" 5400rpm drive and got 38MB/s, and that's a pretty old one.

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Paul

It's all a matter of purpose.

eSATA on it's own doesn't really offer any direct benefits over firewire or USB2.

However eSATA is designed primarily for hard drives or other ATA compliant devices. USB and Firewire are designed for many many uses. So logic would say if you've got an eSATA port available, you may as well use it because it's not going to be used for much else, whereas a USB or firewire port could be.

Also bear in mind firewire and USB are daisy chain technologies. This meaning that your 400 or 480mbit/s is shared among all devices connected to a root hub.

So if you were to have a USB hard drive on a root hub along with a 300mbit WIFI "n" adaptor your hdd and 300mbit wifi would share the same 480mbit.

Conversely with eSATA the only thing it's likely to share bandwidth with is your other HDDs. Unless in raid you're not likely to read from more than one disk at a time in such a way that'll cause bottlenecks.

A quick note about SSDs. They are not "faster" than magnetic storage. They have a very low random access time. However, as you will find by running HDTach on a Flash drive, the sustained read / write speeds are lacking way, way behind that of magnetic storage and RAID setups. This is great for sticking your virtual memory on and for server based OS drives and such where things like registry are rarely referenced and written sequentially, but for the average Joe who wants to copy files to a DVD, install programs, play games etc SSDs will seem slower loading/saving things than a well kept magnetic drive.

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Google to rescue Linux from Microsoft lawyers

Paul

You can't patent logic.

I think this is a fundamental flaw in 'the system'. Software shouldn't be subject to patents, copyrights, yes if you write a complete program you can protect that, but patenting parts of software that are made up of common building blocks like mathematical operations and language specific syntax.

As for microsoft they're just being their usual combative self. They know full well it'll cost more tracking down and summonsing all the users of their 200 patents would probably cost more than it'll make.

If anything this somewhat flailing swipe at Opensource is merely confirmation that Linux, OpenOffice and alike are becoming an ever more potent threat to the MS monopoly. I believe this attack was never intended to take on the members of the opensource network, instead it's to spread fear or an MS summons into prospective End Users in the hope they'll not risk taking on a liability.

With regards to that Novell comment, I sincerely doubt Novell would shop out anyone in the opensource community as opensource drives on the functionality and user base of linux , and linux are partially (if not completely by now) owned by Novell, thus damaging the opensource community would shoot themselves in the foot with regards to their own growth.

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