ESATA worth the price?

[tyler384]

I'm going to be buying a new terabyte external hard drive and was looking at one that has USB 2.0 Firewire 400 and ESATA. However i can get a soley USB 2.0 drive with the same space and the same brand at half the price.

How much faster is ESATA compared to USB 2.0?
Sure ESATA's got 3g burst speed compared to 480m
with usb 2.0 but how much longer does it take to copy a gigabyte file?
Is it worth the money?

 

[huron]

I would suggest that if you want E-SATA, that you think about buying an enclosure and putting a drive in it.

I bought a USB 2.0 and E-SATA enclosure for only $30 or so and love it.

I wouldn't pay double the price, but for me it was only like $10-15 over a standard enclosure.

The speed is nice. It's just like running that disk inside my computer.

 

[chookman]

The speed is a heck of a lot better. You need to make sure your machine is setup correctly (driver wise) with AHCI or RAID enabled with hot swap capable drivers.

Agree with huron you can get a better deal on an external enclosure then by the drive to go in it.

 

[Narr]

If you have the option to do so and need it then go for it.
Nothing beats just plugging in the hard drive.

 

[huron]

Here's a deal that newegg has going on. Not sure about the brand, but it is ESATA

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822216035&nm_mc=EMC-IGNEFL121108&cm_mmc=EMC-IGNEFL121108-_-HardDrives-_-L2C-_-22216035

Promo code EMCBCBBAB makes it only 59.99.