USB 3.0 vs. eSATA: Is faster better?

HI Steven,

I came across your article on IT world and thought of sharing this with you.
Sometime in 2010. MSI (MicroStar International) combine eSATA with USB.
Some people like Delock, Dynex, Addonics etc, call the new power eSATAp (Power over eSATA) and some companies like Gigabyte and the rest call it eSATA/USB

http://www.esatap.sg/basic/esatap-support-group/

What are the advantages?
1) The port is now compatible with USB port
2) The eSATAp peripheral is now self-powered
3) On a desktop with 12v rail. The port can even power up a 3.5" HDD/DVD-rw drive using just ONE cable. This is something which even USB 3.0 cannot deliver.
4) Any desktop machine with SATA (literally 99.9% on earth) can use eSATAp with just a simple $15 bracket. Translating 3 parts (SATA, Power & USB 9 pin header)

In 2011, Delock again combine USB 3.0 (19 pin header) with eSATAp now making a single connection possible. Delock also carry USB 3.0 + eSATAp 2.5" enclosure. 3.5" is possible but they stop due to lack of market knowledge(demand).

http://www.esatap.sg/featured/usb-3-0-or-esatap-6gbps-why-not-both/

In 2011, 6Gbps SATA has appeared. Both Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat and Treadlayers have reviewed that USB 3.0 (5Gbps) just match 3Gbps SATA and is behind 6Gbps SATA. (At least 100MB/s bytes per second)

Although USB is the de-facto standard, there is no way to kill eSATAp unless you kill off SATA, which is not going to be easy.

Comparing to USB 3.0, eSATAp doesn't requires an additional controller.
All machines, MAC, Linux, PC, etc are bound to have spare SATA connectors.
There is virtually almost no translation or memory/cpu overheads.

Lastly, eSATAp can be hotplugged too. For older machines, simply just use HotSwap!

Hopes this help shed some lights.

Yours truly,
Colin Kee
Project Evangelist
eSATAp Support Group

I like how the technology keeps surprising me every day, because I hear only innovations and great ideas. I just wonder on which device my registry cleaner will perform faster, on USB or eSata? All the IT producers will have to pass over USB 3.0 because they developed USB 4.0 and it`s not worthy to implement USB 3.0 in all the PC`s and after 2 months to put on the market devices with USB 4.0. All the polemics around this subject have a solution: devices with better read/write speed are better.

I think this is so good that this is so much faster. There is so much that you can do with it. orlando personal injury attorneys

I agree with most reviewers here that the writer lacks knowledge in the very basics of his argument, but i'm not sure i know many others who do, lol... so i'll try not to be too technical.anyway. comparing 2 technologies which have supposedly different purposes is like comparing oranges to apples... eSATA was designed for devices that support SATA, so by definition it handles SATA devices better than other technologies (USB being one of them). it's always better to have a "raw" connection to a device rather than a "converted" connection, but this should be obvious...USB on the other hand is more like a universal connector, hence "universal serial bus"... which means, by definition, it needs a converter (hardware/software) for virtually every device hooked up to it. most "converters" in today's real world are software, which hits your CPU harder.my dedicated laser printer will always outperform my all-in-one office printer, because my laser printer is "dedicated" for the job, and nothing else but that job. i also used to own an old webcam back in the days, the webcam was connected to an internal PCI card, and let me tell you this, i've never had a better webcam since, why? because it had a "Dedicated hardware controller", my pentium II at the time never suffered from the amazing video it used to record. usb webcams afterwards always sucked and my "newer" CPUs always suffered... again, you're comparing "dedication" with "universality" in your article, which is like comparing night and day. dedicated controllers are ALWAYS a winner, no matter what.the testing results of this article were quite flawed as well. first of all, the performance of both hard drives used are the bottleneck. so to be "disappointed" is rather funny. conventional (7200rpm) SATA hard drives have an average throughput of 500mbps (about 50MBps) so comparing SATA and USB3 on these basis is not logical. you need your tests to be based on different criteria. try an external SSD (solid state drive) next time.what you can really compare between the 2 technologies is, for example, portability; which USB 2.0 or 3.0 will always be the winner at, because almost every computer out there supports a version of USB (eSATA is also widely supported). comparison also need to be more specific about the user's requirements.so for your next article, try having a title that says:"Technology 1 VS Technology 2 in Running Device X"here's my own summary: for an external hard drive i'll always have at home/office, i'd always go with eSATA. however, for my the external mini hard drive i always carry around, i'd always go with USB....good luck...

there are several issue with the benchmark:1- it does not describe CPU usage. In my experience, USB is (or can be) a CPU hog, sata isn't.2- it uses a very non-standard setup. Almost nobody uses USB expansion cards, since USB is standard on most motherboards. This can impact results both ways, since the dedicated USB chip may be faster than a CPU's chipset, or going through the PCI-E bus may slow things down.3- it doesn't even cover the usual "large files vs small files" dichotomy4- it covers ONE host and ONE HD, so it's hardly definitive.In the end, not very helpful.

The statement "with a similar drive inside" is most important...Similar drives are not the same, if you took both of those drives out of their cases and connected them to the internal SATA ports of a system, how would they perform?In order to perform a fair test, you should use exactly the same drive with both adapters and ensure that the disk is zeroed out and reformatted cleanly each time.It's also worth testing much faster drives, with slower/older drives the bottleneck will be the drive rather than the connection. Perhaps try some of the 10,000 rpm drives (Faster seek times) and some of the much larger capacity 7200 rpm drives (higher density = faster linear throughput).

Maybe usb 3.0 is a little faster than the esata,but the two are espert in different field,I just think they are all great.Such as this usb 3.0 sata hdd dock,it work with a amazing speed when transfer my huge media files.

Good article!It is now 2011 and I am just learning about USB 3.0 and eSATA. It has been ten months since this article was written and I was wondering if there would be any updates to this article if written today. I am considering an external hard drive for backup, safe storage and portability. I am considering using a cable to go from my internal motherboard SATA connection on one end and an eSATA connection on the other end using an eSATA external hard drive with an external power supply. I am thinking if the pc power supply goes out in the PC it probably will not take the external hard drive with it. Is my reasoning correct? In addition, do I loose portability by using an eSATA drive vs. a USB 3.0 drive?I have seen many different USB cables available on the internet. Do they now have one cable available with a USB 3.0 connection on one end and a USB 2.0 on the other?Any other information you can provide would be very helpful. Thank you.

Copy your files, instead of moving them....If you copy, if anything goes wrong, they are still on the original hard drive location. You should always copy anyways, then delete. I think, i don't know, maybe, lol

I use USB 2.0 drives connectedto my laptop at the moment and occasionally they get accidentally disconnected during whilst sata is being transferred, but I have fortunately not lost anything. What would happen if an eSATAp drive were suddenly disconnected during data transfer? I am thinking that USB 2.0/3.0 may provide some sort of advantage in security over data loss or hard drive damage in the event of an unexpected interruption.Does anyone know?Thanks.

Very helpful article. Nothing like a little benchmark test to get an idea of real world results.

Implementing eSATAp (eSATA + USB) is easy. All you need is to install a Delock bracket which translate your internal SATA signal & 12v power to eSATAp.ZERO driver installation. NO BIOS OS AHCI tweak or windows registry tweak is needed.The Delock bracket only cost less than USD 15 a compared to USB 3.0eSATAp CAN also be implemented on a MAC pro & Linux machine, since 99% of the machine have SATA.eSATAp is still faster than USB 3.0. Go to Youtube key inesata ncix.eSATAp is found in 40% of the notebooks from Toshiba, Sony, Dell, HP, Acer, LG, FujitsueSATA (original) is found in 80% of the NAS storage. E.g. Synology, Thecus, Buffalo, Dlink, Qnap, etc.eSATAp can power a 3.5" HDD/SSD or 5.25" Bluray dvd-rw on desktop using a SINGLE cable.To safely add & remove eSATAp simply download HotSwap!Currently Delock produces eSATAp products.One port in the blood of all. One port to UNITE them all. - eSATAp Support Group.

Good writer. But his tech background sucks. He is Ok for writign popular stories. Yet he doesn't know the difference between Mbps and MBps, how USB protocol is encoded and utter lack of understanding that no matter ho wfast USB3 is, it sitll pumps data into a SATA at th eothe rend so the best thing you can hope is not to lose speed in conversion.But that's OK. Engineers don't become popular magazines writers, so I don't expect him to know technicalities.

Page 1 of the article has this incorrect sentence:Now, eSATA can handle 300 MBps (MegaBytes per second) and USB 3.0 can wheel and deal up to 625 MBps.The correct numbers are:eSATA at 3.0Gbps = 300 MBpsUSB-3 at 5.0Gbps = 500 MBps (not 625)Both interfaces use 8b10b encoding for transferring data on the wires. Each byte passing across the wires uses 10 bits, not the usual 8 used elsewhere. So to convert from megabits per second to megabytes per second a divide by 10 is needed.

How can you possibly expect a SATA hard drive to perform better on USB than SATA? It doesn't matter how fast or fancy the USB bus is, at the other end , it's still **SATA**. The best you can possibly hope for is not loosing performance in the conversion.

Are there any SATA to USB bridges which pass SMART info about the drive? If you're using external drives for any important application, isn't it important to know if there are any impending failures?

Sometimes, disk access is about more than just read and/or write speed. It is about the set of commands that the interface supports. eSATA has the same commands as SATA, which means any of those strange programs and disk management tools that support SATA disks will also support eSATA disks. USB support will always be less than ideal, since it doesn't support the complete SATA protocol.

It would be nice to have CPU utilization reported as well. For example, if during your eSATA transfers your cpu was at 10%, but during USB 3.0 transfers it went up to 50%, that would be good to know.

Steven, Mbps is 'megaBITS per second', which is the usual way of expressing wire speed. If you want to say 'megaBYTES per second', then it's MBps, which assumes 8 bits to the byte plus control bits. However, when you're discussing wire speed, Mbps is generally considered the standard so that we're all on the same page.