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eSATA Connectors

Posted by Hemos on Mon Mar 19, 2007 09:24 AM
from the feel-the-excitment dept.
Networking IT
buffalocheese writes "Since the introduction of the Serial ATA 1.0a specification in 2002, many manufacturers have introduced PCI and CardBus cards with both internal and external SATA connections. At first these internal and external connectors were completely identical, but later, external connectors started to appear which were still fully compatible with the internal sockets but featured added extra screening for external use. With the introduction of the SATA II specification in mid 2004 a new external SATA connector was defined. These new external (eSATA) connectors are not compatible with the original internal SATA connection. Currently there are add-on cards and drive housings available which feature both types of SATA connection for external use. Gradually the older types will disappear and all new SATA cards will feature the eSATA connector for external drive connections."
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  • Are they better, or just different? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jandrese (485) <kensama@vt.edu> on Monday March 19 2007, @09:29AM (#18401209) Homepage Journal
    Frankly, I'm not a big fan of the current SATA connectors. They tend to fall off at the slightest provocation. I can't work in my case without having to check at the end that all of the SATA connectors are still in place (and at least one of them is usually loose or completely off). Because of this I've been reluctant to switch to SATA on external enclosures. If this new connector can prove itself resistant to falling off, it may in fact be a winner (I would even advocate unifying the connectors again under the new standard). I do like the fact that both the external and internal SATA connectors are currently the same, I just don't like the connector itself. It's rather nice to be able to take an old AT power supply (the kind where the power switch is hardwired to the supply) and plug in an off of the shelf SATA drive to the back of my case in a pinch. Plus, fewer connector types means fewer adapters I'll eventually have to own.
    • While I don't suffer from the connectivity problem, I have another gripe: SATA connectors stick straight out.

      Sure, you can spend a bit more to get a good, angled cable. But the free ones included with hard drives and motherboards are always annoying.
      • I actually have the opposite gripe (but usually about the power connectors), the connector is usually flush with the drive but the power cables come out the top and bottom of it. If you have anything adjascent to your drive (another drive, 8800GTX, etc...) the cables have to be bent at a sharper angle than I prefer. I actually still prefer using the Molex connectors most of the time because they fit snugly, are easy to access (they're on the right hand side of the drive), and the cables stick straight out the back.

    • Re:Are they better, or just different? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Coopjust (872796) on Monday March 19 2007, @09:49AM (#18401407)
      I have an eSATA external drive. My current mobo doesn't have eSATA built in, but I use it via a SATA to eSATA adapter card in my PC.

      Well, it's definitely more snug than a regular SATA cable, but it isn't quite as snug as USB. Still, the speed is amazing, and the cables are better IMO. The speed is definitely faster than USB.

      Only catch is if I hook up a drive while in Windows with that converter, it'll lockup. Has to be turned on before I boot the computer. This is a limitation of the adapter; from what I've read, you should be able to hot swap with a "real" eSATA port.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by TheThiefMaster (992038)
        You should be able to hot-swap with "real" SATA 2.0 as well. My guess is you've plugged you're adapter into a SATA 1.0/1.1 socket and that's why you have no hot-swap.

      • I have an eSATA external drive. My current mobo doesn't have eSATA built in, but I use it via a SATA to eSATA adapter card in my PC...

        Only catch is if I hook up a drive while in Windows with that converter, it'll lockup. Has to be turned on before I boot the computer. This is a limitation of the adapter; from what I've read, you should be able to hot swap with a "real" eSATA port.

        Another possible reason for your inability to hot-swap is that the SATA ports might be set to "IDE mode" in the motherboard's BIOS. This is a common setup on "home-built" computers since "IDE mode" allows pre-Vista Windows installation without the "F6 (floppy) installation method." To enable hot-swap, the SATA ports must be set to "SATA/AHCI mode" in the BIOS.

        Here's some instructions from Intel's site on changing SATA modes on their motherboards:

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by GIL_Dude (850471)
      Thinking back to the old centronics cable that old printers had and some SCSI-1 connections used they had little clips on the side that you fliiped up to lock the cable into place. Maybe we need some kind of similar device for SATA cables. This would be fairly simple and wouldn't require changing the connection itself; just something that slipped over/around it or something would be sufficient. I know I just re-did my machine by moving the ports on the existing 2 250 GB SATA drives and adding 2 500 GB SATA
    • Actually, there is a product that can help with this. You might want to try it [krazyglue.com].
    • The bodies of the connectors are also fragile. I broke a piece off one while just trying to push some cables aside. They need to make them stronger and shorter so they exert less leverage on the board's connector.
    • Yet another connector hidden in the back where you have to keep fiddling to get the plug in... In this case two tries should suffice, but geesh I bet they spend millions coming up with another useless connector (how is it better than the sata version?). At the very least they could have made it very obvious from the outside which way the plug should go in, but the hole is symmetrical, but the internals of the connectors are very much not so.

      I stand by my opinion that connector people are idiots.

    • Tell me about it. Current SATA connectors are horrible in some situations. I've actually had situations where I've had to use a glue gun to literally keep the connectors from coming off on their own.

      That's utterly horrible, and damned lame.
    • It's your cables, and not necessarily because they're cheap. As the IT person for a 100% SATA shop I've had plenty of experience with this. Some SATA cables will fall off, sometimes without any provocation, others won't come off without significant provocation. Some SATA cables even have locking mechanisms to hold them to your drives. Asus for example ships motherboards with one of two different types of SATA cables. In my experience the red ones suck and the gray ones are excellent, but which you get

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Afrosheen (42464)
        Yeah the cables make all the difference. Gigabyte generally ships their boards with the nice yellow SATA cables which have locking tabs on both sides of the connector. It just takes a light pinch to remove them from the SATA socket, but once they're in, they're not going anywhere.

        If only everyone spent .05 on two pieces of tin to make all cables lock like those. *sigh*

    • Re:Are they better, or just different? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ChrisA90278 (905188) on Monday March 19 2007, @11:03AM (#18402257)
      "...I'm not a big fan of the current SATA connectors. They tend to fall off at the slightest provocation. I can't work in my case without having to check at the end that all of the SATA connectors are still in place..."

      This is a poor case design. The best way to use a SATA drive is to have NO CABLE. The drives are designed to they can be pushed onto a socket that is soldered to a printed circuit board. All new design computers should be designed this way, with no cable. Drive push into the computer from the front like SCSI drives with SCA connectors

      If the computer uses a cable (for power or data) then it is a retrofit, a hold over from the IDE era. Over time internal cables should just "go away". Now you see way the connector can't be totight or have a positive retention (latch.)
  • I really don't see the advantage in having 2 types of connectors doing the same thing for internal and external use.

    Except they want to sell me another cable - or did I miss anything?
    • Nope, you've got it all right.
    • Yes. The internal connectors/old external connectors are poorly suited for external use. Just brushing one of those can nudge the cable out of its socket.

      As an aside, I think the industry should really standardize on something to be a 'universal' interface, like USB or Firewire for desktop systems. Let's just remove all other types of interfaces, even VGA/DVI/HDMI cables and maybe even Ethernet. By standardizing the interfaces, end users will be far less confused, the interface decided upon will be furthe
      • There is actually a range of cost in the physical connector, as there is a range in the function of those connectors.

        Universalizing also risks having people plug the wrong thing into the wrong place, unless the underlying physical and logical transport is also the same, in which case cost is an even bigger issue.
      • By standardizing the interfaces, end users will be far less confused

        Clearly you've never actually worked with end-users. The fact that the major connectors are physically different, and therefore won't fit in the other holes no matter how hard you push, is the only reason they're sometimes plugged into the correct spot now.

      • As an aside, I think the industry should really standardize on something to be a 'universal' interface, like USB or Firewire for desktop systems. Let's just remove all other types of interfaces, even VGA/DVI/HDMI cables and maybe even Ethernet.

        By keeping different cord types, they prevent different communications protocols from plugging into the wrong ports. For instance, the ethernet protocol and the USB protocol are not compatible. Therefore, the layman user won't accidentally plug their mouse port into

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by alta (1263)
          It's funny about your USB/Ethernet example. A usb device will fit in an ethernet port quite easily. It will even be snug in one direction, although it will wobble the other way. On a lot of our Dells the Ethernet port is directly above a stack of 2-4 USB ports. A few times I've given one of the computers the reach-around and found i've plugged a mouse in the wrong port. Shorting all the pins on an ethernet card can't be a good thing, I think this is a bad design.

      • As an aside, I think the industry should really standardize on something to be a 'universal' interface, like USB or Firewire for desktop systems. Let's just remove all other types of interfaces, even VGA/DVI/HDMI cables and maybe even Ethernet. By standardizing the interfaces, end users will be far less confused, the interface decided upon will be further commoditized and prices for cables and connectors and such will fall.

        You are kidding right? Average user can barely tell the difference between these cables now and you want to make them all look the same to make it LESS confusing. It will just confuse them more. You will find the monitor plugged into the ethernet port, keyboards into the video port and hard drive plugged into the wall socked and a frustrated user going "why isn't this working?!?!?!?" I mean most people cant tell the difference between VGA and 9-pin serial port, and forget about the number of people who try

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by atarione (601740)
      well....... the SATA cable is kinda of a joke, (really easy to damage or knock loose)..... using a SATA cable for an external drive seems like a bad idea. But then again I'm not sure the eSATA are any more resilient

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA [wikipedia.org]

      also it appears you can go to 2 meters in length with eSATA as opposed to maximum 1 meter with regular SATA cables
      • well....... the SATA cable is kinda of a joke, (really easy to damage or knock loose)

        I just assembled a new system last week, and can't speak highly enough of SATA. With IDE cables, it always seemed no matter what, you always had to turn around the ribbon cable upside down to fit the hard drive or optical drive. The ribbon cable, in all its wonderful cheapness was a huge hassle to snake around a case, and had a wonderful airflow-choking design. Sometimes it's too short of a distance from the motherboard con

    • Re:Any advantages over having only one connector? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Guspaz (556486) on Monday March 19 2007, @09:49AM (#18401417) Homepage
      The official specs for eSATA essentially say the cable is better suited for external use. Here's what they have to say about it:

      The external cable connector is a shielded version of the connector specificed in SATA 1.0a with these basic differences:

                  The External connector has no "L" shaped key, and the guide features are vertically offset and reduced in size. This prevents the use of unshielded internal cables in external applications.

                  To prevent ESD damage, the insertion depth is increased from 5mm to 6.6mm and the contacts are mounted further back in both the receptacle and plug.

                  To provide EMI protection and meet FCC and CE emission requirements, the cable has an extra layer of shielding, and the connectors have metal contact points.

                  There are springs as retention features built into the connector shield on both the top and bottom surfaces.

      The external connector and cable are designed for over five thousand insertions and removals while the internal connector is only specified to withstand fifty.

      They make it pretty clear exactly what's different. The biggest difference is the cable is shielded, while internal SATA is not (or less so?). And obviously the connector being rated for a hundred times more insertions is a pretty big difference.

      I should note that in recent benchmarks done by MaximumPC, eSATA did not provide substantial performance benefits over Firewire800 drives. eSATA featured a higher burst speed, but more or less equivalent average transfer rates and seek times. Unless there were specific licensing issues with Firewire 800, I would rather have seen it become the preferred drive interface; I'll take a general purpose connector that I can use for other stuff over something as specific as eSATA any day, especially when eSATA provides little benefit.
      • I see, the external cables are shielded. Tha makes a lot of sense. Because, after all, there's way more EMI outside of my computer case than inside.
        • The shielding is not only to prevent interference *into* the cable, it's also to prevent the cable from generating interference for other devices. See CE certification and EMI certification etc.

          At 3GHz, it'll make a very nice antenna out of any wire - the shielding is a necessity for certification.
      • It might not be mush faster than FW-800, but it CANNOT be slower.
        (as FW just adds an additional layer of complexity, with the drive being sata anyways)

        • It might not be mush faster than FW-800, but it CANNOT be slower.
          (as FW just adds an additional layer of complexity, with the drive being sata anyways)

          You assume that the SATA protocol has equal or better efficiency than the firewire protocol.

          For example, that latency sensitivity of SATA is less than or equal to that of firewire. You might be right, you might be wrong, I don't know. You might make the same assumption about USB, in which case you would definitely be wrong - the longer your USB cable, the s

  • adverstory (Score:2, Insightful)

    by alta (1263)
    Errr, is someone pushing their product here?

  • In the classroom (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Nom du Keyboard (633989) on Monday March 19 2007, @10:21AM (#18401759)
    I felt like I was in the classroom listening to the instructor drone on as I read this article summary. While this may be worthwhile to know, it's unexciting to the point of boring. The slownewsday tagger was correct.

  • There is no "SATA II" (Score:4, Informative)

    by imroy (755) <ian@testers.homelinux.net> on Monday March 19 2007, @11:01AM (#18402221) Homepage Journal

    SATA II is the old name of the organisation that created the SATA standard (although I can't find what the acronym used to stand for). It has since changed its name to SATA-IO ("International Organisation") because everyone mistook the two I's as Roman numerals and assumed the newly created SATA 3Gb/s standard was "version 2" of SATA. It's not. It's just a new signalling rate and other features like NCQ are separate.

  • "Everyone please now and listen to OverLord Amphe Knoll!" AK: "You have done well, pilgrims. The connector conspiracy advances! Let us review our proud history:
    • 1938: The holy RCA Phono connector! The one that connects the center conductor FIRST and blows out the speakers with hum! Also, it has no detent so it can fall out given a light breeze! That was a goodie!
    • 1941: The Ubiquitous UHF connector! The one that connects the center pin first and either blows out the receiver, or burns up the hapless HAM or CB user! Also it seems to have a detent, but there's aq 50% chance its a false fit and will wiggle loose
    • 1961: The Japanese hollow tube power plug! 10001 different voltages and currents in one connector! Lotsa sales there of replacement radios.
    • 1972: Of the Ma Bell RJ modular connectors, we will not speak. Anybody can make a mistake and make a sturdy, usable, latching connector once in a while. Luckily our agents infiltrated the factories and made the latches prone to snag on wires and break off after five uses. A partial recovery for the forces of connector darkness!
    • 1974: 40-pin flat cable connectors: Another goal for our side! Connectors with no latching or detents, plus 180 degree ambiguity! Lots of smoke if you guess wrong!
    • 1985: The Mac AppleTalk connector! Supposedly a DIN standard, but we sneaked in plenty of gotchas, like no detent and easily confused with and smashed into the DIN 3 connector!
    • 2003: The SATA connector! A home run! No useful grounding, no shielding, and it falls out if you just look at it!
    • 2006: External SATA connector: Well,a partial win. A few improvements got sneaked in. Our hope is the users will confuse the old and new styles and break off some disk drive pins. No soup for anybody until you dream up a new SATA3 connector with more confounding features. I'm thinking: explosions, or at least melt-downs
    • Damn...and I just bought a USB-SATA bridge to replace my obsolete USB-IDE bridge.

      Curse you, Sabrent!

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by profplump (309017)
          It's not a bad idea, save the configuration part. How does the drive get an IP address? How does it resolve conflicts for addresses with other devices on the bus? How does your motherboard find the attached devices? If you're running iSCSI it's not just an Ethernet connector, it's a full-on TCP network. There are solutions to these problems, but they go beyond "add an Ethernet interface" -- you'd need DHCP and SLP or the likes at the very least just to get everything talking, and all embedded both on the di

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by TheRaven64 (641858)

            The problem with ethernet connected drives is that the lag is higher than that of internal drives

            Ethernet over one single hop (no switching) has a latency of under 1ms. Over two cables with a switch in the middle, and adding on the overhead of IP, I get a round trip time of 0.2-0.3ms. The average seek time for a hard drive is 4-9ms. The extra latency of using ethernet would not be significant.

            A lot of latency can be added by expensive protocols like SMB or NFS, but something like iSCSI can be very fast.

    • Re:Ruse to sell more motherboards (Score:5, Informative)

      by Guspaz (556486) on Monday March 19 2007, @09:41AM (#18401331) Homepage
      While I'm not as certain when it comes to graphics cards, PCI-Express is/was sorely needed to replace PCI for general expansion cards. PCI had a limited amount of bandwidth available that was extremely easy to saturate (A single gigabit NIC would hit a bandwidth wall at something like 400mbit). The shared nature of the PCI bus was also an extremely frustrating limitation.

      By contrast, PCI-Express 1x slightly increases the bandwidth from roughly 133MB/s to 150MB/s, but more importantly each device gets that, it's not shared anymore. And of course, 2x and higher slots provide more bandwidth.

      But when it comes to graphics, AGP 8x was (at the time) providing more than enough bandwidth... as for the demands of modern monsterous graphics cards (such as the 8800 GTX), for all I know they might be able to saturate an AGP 8x bus.

      As I understand it anyhow, the more tangible benefits from moving from AGP to PCI-Express were increase bi-directional bandwidth (AGP was great at Host->Card, but sucked at Card->Host), and increased ease with sticking multiple PCI-Express slots on the motherboard, making modern SLI possible.
      • AGP was only for Graphics cards and I am pretty sure you where limited to only one AGP slot.
        I think the idea with PCIe is that if we are going to make a really fast interface for things like RAIDs and network interface cards we might as well replace AGP at the same time so we only have one type of slot to deal with.

      • Re:Ruse to sell more motherboards (Score:4, Informative)

        by Joe The Dragon (967727) on Monday March 19 2007, @10:27AM (#18401831)
        AGP was only fast one way pci-e is fast for bandwidth both ways.
      • One correction, one addition:
        I'm fairly positive that it's 250 MB/sec per lane, not 150 for PCI-E.

        In addition, not only is that per-device, it is per-device, per-direction (full duplex, 250MB/sec to the device and 250MB/sec back at the same time)

        As to why PCI-E couldn't have been developed back when PCI or AGP were available (rather than incremental steps) - Moore's law. It simply wasn't possible to make silicon capable of handling PCI Express data rates (each lane uses serial communications at 2.5 gbits/sec, which was definately NOT possible with the silicon available back when PCI or AGP were initially developed.)

        For those that wonder why PCI-E uses 2.5 Gbit/sec signaling but only transfers 250MB/sec of data, it is because all data is encoded using either 4B5B or 8B10B encoding (I can't remember which of the two), which maps every 4 data bits to 5 signal bits for 4B5B or 8-to-10 for 8B10B. This is done to ensure a minimum number of bit transitions in a given period of time, and also ensure that the signaling has no DC bias. (i.e. equal number of 0s and 1s no matter what the input data is).
    • Hey, if you want to keep using your Packard Bell 286 with the ISA slots and monochrome VGA, I won't stop you. But remember, it still takes them a little time to reverse-engineer all these technologies from the alien spacecraft they recovered in '48.
    • You got modded troll not because the eSata isn't a ruse, but because all the other things aren't. Maybe we could have jumped from agp 2x to apg 16x in 1 jump, but express is different enough that they couldn't have just been 'able to invent the express part a few years back' any more than they could have just invented P4's instead of 2's and 3's.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by danbert8 (1024253)
      I don't know about you, but while IDE and SATA may not have a noticeable performance impact, it sure is nice to have SATA when building or upgrading a computer. First SATA connectors are smaller, so they don't block airflow like ribbons. And second, SATA bypasses the insane primary/secondary, master/slave, legacy support, jumper hell.

      As far as your AGP and ddr2 gripe. AGP had reached the limit of it's functions, and PCI-express is a better standard than AGP ever was. And DDR2 is not anything to

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by ardor (673957)
      Hold on. Many upgrades are not really necessary, but among the ones you missed were:

      * PCI-Express: A true PCI successor at last. Back when the 3D accelerators were taking off, the PCI bus turned out to be not efficient enough, but a successor was not in sight. So, AGP was invented, which is essentially a PCI slot with accelerated CPU->GPU transfer (i.e. a hack).
      * SATA: Longer, MUCH thinner cables, hotplugging functionality, lower power consumption, Native Command Queuing (the HD can rearrange requests fo

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by tomstdenis (446163)
      That's standard, most SATA cables lack any sort of locking clip which makes them fantastically unsafe to use. My suggestion is to not move your desktop a lot. And if you do move it, check the cables first.

      In my case I spent an hour or so chasing cables that would pull out, e.g. secure it to the mobo, it would pull on the drive. It didn't help that I had 4 SATA drives at the time...

      If you're so inclined you could try gluing them into the mobo, then tape it to the drive. Bonus points for using duct tape

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Grishnakh (216268)
      Ignore the other responder to your question. Your cables suck. There's better ones available. I used to do embedded software development on a system that used 4 (or 8 or 16) SATA drives, and I've gone through a lot of different cables. Some don't attach very securely, and sound like the ones you have. Others were very secure; I could pick up the drive and move it around in operation and the connector didn't come loose. I believe some of the better cables had "Foxconn" connectors. We also found that n

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by TheRaven64 (641858)
      I'd rather see drives with native FireWire controllers than SATA or eSATA. Sure, SATA gives more bandwidth, but only in theory. A single hard drive comes nowhere near close to being able to saturate a FireWire 800 link, let alone [e]SATA. On the other hand, you can plug multiple devices into a FireWire chain. I have two FireWire 800 hard disks on a shelf, and I can connect them to my laptop with a single FireWire cable. If I moved to eSATA then my laptop would need two eSATA ports, and I would need to

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