eSATA questions...

S

Suprnova04

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 1, 2004
Messages
439
Hi guys, I've been out of the loop for a while and I'm being pulled back in out of necessity for my job... so I have a couple questions!

eSATA, as I understand it, is basically the same as SATA except for a few modifications. Primarily:
-Cable length
-Shielding
-Connection insert-length

My questions are:
--With these differences, can your average SATA drive be used, for example, in an eSATA dock? (being that eSATA is referring to the connections of the dock and not the drive, right?)
--If I were to get an eSATA addon card for my desktop, would the internal cabling connect to the SATA connections on my mobo?
--Is there anything else important I should know?

Thanks in advance guys, I appreciate the help!
-Dan-
 
-With these differences, can your average SATA drive be used, for example, in an eSATA dock? (being that eSATA is referring to the connections of the dock and not the drive, right?)
Click to expand...

Yes of course. That is what the esata externals are using.

--If I were to get an eSATA addon card for my desktop, would the internal cabling connect to the SATA connections on my mobo?
Click to expand...

Not an $30 to $50 eSATA addon card. A $5 to $10 eSATA bracket would do this however. Although some die hards would frown against using the bracket to convert SATA to eSATA since there is no electronics its just a cable combiner mounted on a bracket.
 
Thank you for the response.

So if a more expensive addon card does not connect to the SATA mobo connection, how would it connect?

Thanks,
-Dan-
 
The more expensive add-in cards plug into a PCI of PCIe slot. They have on board SATA controller similar to the one built into the mobo south bridge, though generally not of the same quality. Silicon Image is one of the the more common manufacturers of controller that you'll find on the add-in cards.
 
There could theoretically be a card that does not have its own SATA controller and connects to the MOBO SATA ports. Basically they would connect to the PCIe bus only for power. These cards should not have any chips on the card maybe a capacitor or two but definitely no 1 cm square (or larger) chips.
 
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