Hooking up an eSATA enclosure to my old PATA system

I've just got four Seagate 500GB 7200.11 w/32MB cache drives. I want to get a new external enclosure to use some of the drives. I probably will have to hook up my new enclosure to a 5-year old system that supports only PATA. I am using the old exclusively to file transfers over the net......

Two enclosures I am eyeing on.
3.5" HDD enclosure w/ eSATA, 1394a, USB2.0
3.5" HDD enclosure w/ eSATA, 1394a, 1394b, USB2.0

My question is really about the enclosure's support for eSATA and 1394b. As my motherboard supports only PATA drives, is it logical to think that both the eSATA and 1394b features are useless to me? My motherboard has only 1394a ports and the new 1394b's connector is different from that for 1394a.....that is why I think 1394b is also useless in my case.

My old motherboard - Gigabyte GA-8IRXP
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Product [...] uctID=1298

Need some hints here...

That surely solves the eSATA part problem. Thanks for that!!!

Well up till now, I am big fan of 1394 interface - 24x7 and always rock solid and stable transfer. So I may also want the enclosure with 1394b as well. For this to work, I will need put another 1394a+b expansion card to my m/d PCI slot. Correct? Just following the same logic LOL

Not true. 1394b speed is 800Mb/sec, eSATA is 1.5Gb/sec (over twice as fast as 1394b) or 3.0Gb/sec (over 4 times as fast as 1394b).

Also, 1394b requires some processing overhead (not as much as USB) which slows the theoretical transfer rates down. eSATA is native to both the computer and the hard drive, and requires no additional processing overhead.

You will get full hard drive speed from eSATA, just like you would get if the hard drive was running on internal SATA. eSATA and internal SATA are in fact, the same, with slightly different cable and electrical design for eSATA that allows longer cables.