USB 3 or eSATA

[Donald]

I see few laptops with either USB 3 or eSATA. How are people attaching fast SATA 3 hard drives? USB 2 is painfully slow. A year ago I thought eSATA would take off, but it has not. The external hard drives seems to support USB 3, but few laptops do. If they do they have one USB 3 port.

 

[rjacket]

Lenovo has Ultrabay

 

[Donald]

Thats pretty limited. My external hard drive is a 2 x 2TB (3.5") drives using RAID 1 within the enclosure.

 

[Rand]

I wouldnt call it painfully slow.. its still around 35MB/sec I had to backup a register over 128kbit dsl upload.... thats painfully slow You could get a usb or esata card. the problem is since esata isnt self powering you either need a usb to power (if 2.5" hdd) or a tranformer. IMO for all my laptop operations usb 2.0 is fine for now considering i just plug in my 500GB drive and go.. 1 short cable and done. Havent seen too many usb 3.0 cards yet for laptops.

 

[dparm]

USB 3.0 allows for longer runs than eSATA. Performance is virtually the same in real-world usage because both protocols are far faster than the [slow] platter drives that use them. SSD externally will show you what's really possible.

 

[Colt45ws]

USB 3. I went with that for my external drives because its still backwards compatible with USB 2. Im going to get a USB3 ExpressCard for my laptop eventually.

 

[kr_bitog]

It does not really matter, USB3 driver is not mature yet, so the difference with USB in the real world is not much. eSATA is much faster if it works, but the problem if you use Seagate Freeagent most of the time it won't work reliably.