eSATA port on Studio XPS 16

I'm about to get a 4TB external hd WD MyBook Studio II and planning to use eSATA port on my 1645.
I'm not really clear of how eSATA works and read somewhere that it will require a Power-over-eSATA cable which WD didn't include in their 4TB package.

Can anyone help to confirm whether the eSATA/USB combo port in SXPS 1645 will work? and what is the required eSATA cable?

 

I would also like to know about this. Also, Are external hard drives with eSATA port available in India ?

 

eSATA doesn't supply power to a device, like USB or Firewire does. You use a regular eSATA cable, nothing special. You'll need to plug your external drive in with a power adapter, included with the hard drive.

I can confirm that the eSATA works just fine, I use it with my 1TB external drive. And eSATA is awesome BTW, it used to take me hours to transfer a few hundred GB of video through USB, no it only takes about 15 min with eSATA.

 

what on earth is an eSATA ? @@

 

External SATA. It's that funny looking USB/eSATA combo port on the right hand side of the XPS16, to the rear of the slot-load DVD. It allows you to connect an external hard drive to the computer using the same interface that is used to connect the internal hard drives. Really speeds up external hard drives compared to USB or even Firewire.

 

I'm relieved to hear that. I'm planning to get this 4TB WD Studio Edition II. I assume it should be ok?

So as long as we're using a desktop 3.5" external hd which will definitely also use a power adaptor, a normal eSATA cable will work just fine.
But if we're using a portable 2.5" external hd, then a powered-eSATA cable will be required instead. Is my understanding correct?

USB3.0 is better but since we're stuck with our xps16 and no usb3.0, I guess no choice but to go for eSATA for its 3Gb/sec.

 

I disagree that USB3.0 would be noticeably better. Even the 15k RPM drives or SSDs aren't fast enough to take advantage of the full transfer rate offered by SATA II. Besides, SATA is made specifically for storage, and USB is more of a universal solution.

But yes, for 3.5" external drives, you'll need an external power adapter, whether you are using eSATA, USB, or Firewire. For 2.5" drives I've seen implementations where you use a regular eSATA cable for data transfer, and a regular USB cable for power, or ones with the eSATAP. eSATAP, is just regular eSATA combined with power drawn from the USB bus anyway, it just uses one cable.

I think there may be some 3.5" single-drive external HDDs that can use eSATAP, but the WD drive, being a raid setup, requires way more power than USB can provide. Also, according to the website, the drive you're getting doesn't come with a regular eSATA cable either.

 

I just realized that it didn't come with eSATA cable.

However to sum it up, there won't be any issue with port, power or anything since it will be running on power adaptor, right? and I just need to get a regular eSATA cable.

 

yes, that's correct.

 

Cool, thanks much!