ExpressCard eSata?

Hi, I just got my M1530 and asside from the issues with the bezel, and getting tingly shocks from the palm rest, im very happy.

I have a 500GB SataII 16mb cache 7200rpm desktop drive now redundant (as my xps is a desktop replacement) and ive purchased an eSata/USB2.0 enclosure for it

Question's

1. Will that drive, connected bia eSata via an eSataII expresscard, be faster than the 5400rpm internal drive

2. Can I install and run software from the drive? i.e. the disk would stay at home, and i'd love to install all my games to esata drive, so then when I take the laptop to uni, I cant be tempted to play games as they aint installed!

 

U can get the e-sata card from here-http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16839200006

Coming to ur questions--
1. AFAIK, No because, real world speeds of e-sata are lower than internal sata drives. so, theres not going to be a 'BIG" difference. but u may still be able to notice it..
2.Sure its possible. no problem at all.

 

I am actually very interested in point 2 as well. I have a 64gb SSD and space on my laptop is tight. Thus I opted for a 500gb eSATA drive, but I have yet to truly test if installing programs on the drive would work. Basically I want to put all of the non-immediately necessary stuff on the drive (i.e. some games, photoshop, etc. with shortcuts on my desktop/start menu. If somone who has done this can chime in, that would be awesome.

Thanks!

 

I've run eSATA via ExpressCard and the speed I got was exactly the same as if the SATA HDD was mounted internally.

I would expect a 500GB 7200rpm desktop HDD to be faster than your notebook's internal drive since those bigger and faster disks give better access times and data transfer.

It would be possible to install the games onto an external HDD using a custom installation option.

Definitely worth trying IMO.

John

 

yeah, the reason i asked about speed was because if the expresscard interface doesnt bottleneck (what is its bandwidth by the way) then it would just perform as a 7200 fully connected disk, therefore faster than the one inside.

I just wanna ensure I dont have the distraction of games at uni, because now with some powerful 3d hardware (old system: 634 vs 3800 in 3DM06) i WILL end up playing them and not doing work

 

thanks, just picked up the roswell from newegg.

 

I have the rosewill card, and I have been experiencing some issues with it. Vkhalsa, can you post/PM me with some info once you get the card? I want to know if your card readily detects the eSATA drive without having to format the drive or have the computer recognize the drive via USB first.

Thanks,

 

I'm probably not going to remember but you're welcome to PM me in ~2 weeks when i get my 1530 and the esata card. I'm going to use it with a seagate freeagent pro. The drive's worked great with USB and firewire but i know some people have been having issues with esata which requires a firmware upgrade. If you're using the same drive i would look into it.

 

The eSATA interface is exactly the same as an internal SATA PCI Express card mounted in your desktop.

I've measured the speeds, and you get speeds that are identical to what you get when you mount the drive internally in a desktop. That certainly means faster than your internal drive - how much of course depends on the drives. But I get 70-80 Mb/s, compared to 20Mb/s over USB2 (same drive, same enclosure).

 

Oh, and there are SATA->eSATA cables, meaning that all you really need the enclosure for is cooling, protection and power. The enclosure circuits aren't actually used.

Next generation eSATA will be powered, so there is *no* need for the complex enclosure.

 

I have my games installed to my external 750gb Freeagent Pro. No special install needed, just do everything like usual. Old programs I had installed on there from my last laptop didn't even need to be tweaked to work with the new one I just bought.

 

really? surely there would have been no registry entries, etc in windows of the new/different laptop.

anyway, good to hear. I'll be ordering a esata card asap. the enclosure does esata and usb2.0, very versatile, i like!

 

Yeah, everything works perfectly so far. I even had Azureus on there with a download in progress. I opened the program up for the first time last night and continued the download with no issues!

 

I'm planning on installing Photoshop and Lightroom on an external esata drive, similar to what you guys are planning on doing.

I have a question though. I would sometime disconnect the drive when I need to be mobile, would that be an issue? Apart from not being able to use the programs I installed on esata.

 

There are definitely advantages to using eSata connections. You WILL notice better transfer speed. If you were using the USB 2 interface, things would definitely be a little slower. I concur that my USB 2 external drive maxes out around 25Mb/s. Sata should be able to reach 50MB/s or more.
Having said that, I hope that vendors will continue to improve speed and transfer rates for harddrives. Especially as I am starting to get into the habit of transferring close to 10 gigs at a time (usually for backups, but sometimes just unloading my digital camera or Mp3s or whatever) it is tiring you have to wait 20-40 minutes for transfers to complete. I look forward to USB 3.0.


You can absolutely run applications galore off of that external drive, and that may turn out to be a fun and convenient way to do it for you. You could run an application off a network server connected to a 56k modem if you wanted to, the fun-ness of that wholly dependent on your patience. What I am trying to say is that provided transfer speeds are good, you can launch an app from virtually anywhere. Once you have what you need in your local memory, you are all set.