eSATA and USB3.0 "incompatible"?

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Surly73

[H]ard|Gawd
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I was corresponding with INEO tech support concerning some questions I had with their I-NA205Ue dock/enclosure system. It is currently eSATA+USB2.0 and I inquired about whether they would be updating it to be eSATA+USB3.0 any time soon.

They responded that eSATA and USB3.0 are "incompatible" and many vendors are trying to get this to work but none have succeeded. Huh? I don't care about eSATA III or eSATA-6 or whatever you want to call it - just eSATA II (3.0Gbps) and USB3.0 in the same enclosure. What do they mean? Google was no help.

For those that may ask, I still care about eSATA even though USB 3.0 is just as fast because eSATA devices show up as regular disks to the host system. This means that ALL disk diagnostics, SMART tools, utilities like DBAN, non-Windows OSes and full disk encryption will ALWAYS work in eSATA mode. Pretty much every USB disk enclosure I've tried has not allowed SMART commands and some similar low level operations so I still value the use of eSATA regardless of speed.
 
the most probable reason is that the tech support person has no idea what they were talking about.

it could also have been meant in another context, but i didnt have the conversation so i cant tell you.

i wouldnt worry about it. USB3 is slowly becoming more and more popular. wait and see.
 
Metaluna said:
Sans Digital makes an eSATA+USB 3.0 enclosure, so I call BS. It could just be that there isn't a bridge chip available that supports both at the moment.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111145
Click to expand...

I noticed when browsing that none of the many enclosures available at my local stores had both eSATA and USB3. They were either USB3 only or eSATA+USB2. After seeing that I started to wonder what was up with the comment from INEO.

As you say, maybe no one has made cheap, canned silicon to do it yet so anyone doing eSATA+USB3 needs to use multiple components and roll their own.
 
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