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HighPoint Announces SATA 6Gb Controller Availability

Jason Barry — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:09:09 -0500

HighPoint Technologies unveiled the Rocket 600 series host adapter. The first of its kind it supports SATA 6Gb/s over PCI-Express 2.0

The Rocket 600 series cards boast 6Gb/s performance for two drives offering 500MB/s throughput. It uses standard SATA cables and connectors and features two types of backwards compatibility. First, it supports PCI-Express 1.0 as well as SATA 3Gb/s and 1.5Gb/s devices. Driver support was written in compliance with the AHCI standard so driver support is native to most operating systems.

The new series features two cards: the Rocket 620 and Rocket 622. The more expensive ($79.99) Rocket 622 offers eSATA ports instead of the SATA connectors on the $69.99 Rocket 620. The new adapters will be available late October into early November.

Data sheet and specifications can be found on the HighPoint site.

OCZ Prepares to Launch eSATA Flash Drives

Justin Kerr — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 19:26:35 -0600

eSATA ports are starting to become more mainstream in mid to low end motherboards, and OCZ thinks the time is right to start adding on non hard drive based peripherals. Its new lineup of memory sticks will do just that and come in 8, 16, and 32GB capacities. The new drives will both communicate and receive their power from the eSATA port. To ensure backwards compatibility they have also included a rear mounted mini USB connection which will allow users to plug the device into laptops or other USB only machines.

No official benchmarks are have been taken by us, but the company is reportedly boasting read speeds of up to 90MB/s, and writes speeds as fast as 30MB/s. No comment has yet been made on pricing, but it will likely be in the same ballpark as its USB brethren.

It certainly is an interesting idea, but I can’t help but wonder if this type of device is really necessary with USB 3.0 right around the corner. USB 3.0 has a maximum theoretical throughput of 4.8Gbps which would easily max out most flash memory keys several times over.

Would you be interested in an eSATA flash drive? Hit the jump and let us know.

Kanguru's New 32GB Flash Drive Combines eSATA and USB

Paul Lilly — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:00:00 -0600

Kanguru has developed a new breed of flash drive eliciting one of those 'Why hasn't someone thought of this before?' moments. The new drive, which the company calls e-Flash, combines both eSATA and USB connectivity on a standard sized thumb drive.

"We’ve combined the fastest connectivity with the most universal connection for the best of both worlds,” said Nate Cote, VP of Product Management at Kanguru Solutions. “The ultra-fast transfer speed, high capacity and small size combine to make it a great portable solution for users that want the next generation of unbelievable performance."

Kanguru says the eSATA connection comes powered so that it requires no extra power, but the company also tosses in an "eSATA + Power bracket and an eSATA + Power cable for easy hookup to the computer you use it most on." The flash drive also comes preloaded with Hotswap! software.

The Kanguru e-Flash currently comes in 16GB and 32GB capacities ($85 and $120 respectively), with a 64GB planned for January 2009. The drive's aluminum casing can also be personalized with a custom engraving.

Image Credit: Kanguru

Asus P5E3 Premium

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 14:34:47 -0600

Motherboard naming conventions have never been easy to follow, but Asus threw us for a loop with its P5E3 Premium board. Is it an even better version of the stellar P5E3 Deluxe that we reviewed in January? Nope. The board actually features Intel’s newest enthusiast x48 chipset, which is, umm, 10 more than the x38 used in the P5E Deluxe board.

Besides the chipsets, you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference between the two boards if they were laid side by side. Like the Deluxe, the Premium has integrated 802.11n wireless capable of running in access-point mode. Both feature a beefy heat pipe, PCI Express 2.0, an Analog Devices audio component, eSATA ports, and spiffy I/O shields. And like the Deluxe, the Premium also sports three physical x16 PCI-E slots, two of which run at x16 PCI-E 2.0 data rates while the third runs at x4 PCI-E data rates. For hardcore gamers, SLI still isn’t supported since Nvidia is limiting its multi-GPUs to its own chipsets. You can run CrossFire mode, but AMD graphics aren’t anybody’s first pick for gaming right now.

Also aboard is the Express Gate feature. It lets you boot into a mini OS that sits in a bit of flash RAM on the motherboard. From this pre-boot environment, you can browse the Internet or access Skype without having to start your OS. It’s an interesting concept, but you can’t save files from the browser. Such capability would make the Express Gate a great emergency tool should your OS get trashed and you need to access the Internet to search for a fix or download a driver or utility.

If the only change is the addition of the x48 chipset, should you upgrade from a P35 or x38? Not necessarily. The key change from the x38 to the x48 is official support for Intel’s upcoming 1,600MHz front-side bus CPUs; the x48 also adds improved Xtreme Memory Profile support, so boards can auto-overclock. Other internal tweaks give it better memory-ratio settings and better voltage control over DDR3 RAM. We must point out, however, that the x38 is perfectly stable on a 1,600MHz front-side bus and many other chipsets are as well. Like a Vulcan, though, Intel must do everything by the book. If it’s going to have 1,600MHz CPUs, it’s damn well going to have a chipset fully validated for it too.

Coming off the high of the x38-based P5E3 Deluxe board, we thought the x48-based P5E3 Premium would be just as impressive. But this board was just plain finicky out of the box, and we had to go through several BIOS requests from Asus to get one that would let us make basic BIOS setting changes. While the Deluxe version excelled against a competing 680i board in January, the Premium couldn’t outrun our XFX Nforce 780i SLI board here. The only numbers worth mentioning are surprisingly subpar disk I/O numbers and a performance edge in FEAR.

The Premium’s one serious advantage over Nvidia’s 780i is still pretty valuable though: validated 1,600MHz front-side bus support, which makes it a far safer bet for anyone who places CPU performance above running two GeForce cards in SLI. But who knows, maybe AMD will do Intel a favor one day by introducing GPUs that people will use.

Western Digital My Book Home Edition

David Murphy — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 18:16:13 -0600

If we were dating the Western Digital My Book Home Edition, the sordid, brief affair would quickly end with one of those “it’s not you, it’s me” conversations. This 1TB enclosure is like the girl (or guy) who keeps calling and texting and e-mailing and IMing and calling and texting again—every time you connect the device to your PC, you get the same annoying application installation window over and over and over.

And of the available applications, we can’t find a single winner: The My Book Home uses a custom-branded, bodily-fluid-poor Memeo backup application as the default and sole option for file preservation. You get a trial version of Memeo AutoSync as well–the same program with a dabbling of encryption. Rounding out the list is Google Spam, er, software—just what you always thought was missing from an external storage device: Picasa, Google Desktop, and a freakin’ toolbar.

A small delight, however, does await you. The My Book Home performs a little better than expected on our eSATA tests. USB and FireWire average read speeds lagged behind those of numerous other drives we’ve tested, including sluggers like Seagate’s FreeAgent Pro and tykes like Toshiba’s Portable External Hard Drive. It’s a tough trade-off to accept, given the slow rate of eSATA adoption.

Seagate FreeAgent Pro

David Murphy — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 18:17:16 -0600

From a design perspective, the Seagate FreeAgent Pro is nearly perfect. The company has turned out a device that looks, dare we say, Apple-esque. Or maybe Orange-esque, the prevailing color that glows and pulsates through the middle of the drive’s tower-like drive holder.

If the FreeAgent’s performance were as noteworthy as the design of this USB-, FireWire-, and eSATA-ready enclosure, we’d have a real winner on our hands. Our model used a 750GB 7200.10 Barracuda drive, and one heckuva clog must exist within the device’s interface, or some hidden quiet-mode feature enabled by default. We were surprised to see only 44.7MB/s average read speeds—on an eSATA connection, no less. The internal version lives in the 66MB/s range, so what gives?

The FreeAgent Pro does little to impress in terms of features as well. Seagate still uses the ever-crappy Memeo AutoBackup application as its primary backup solution, if the name didn’t otherwise give that fact away. Curiously, the drive comes with a system rollback feature. You know, just like that thing that’s bundled with… every modern version of the Windows operating system. And don’t forget the FreeAgent Pro’s Internet Drive–for a mere $120 a year, you can back up 5GB of files online!

If looks were all that mattered, the FreeAgent Pro would be the greatest external drive available today. Too bad poor performance and a lack of features get in the way.

QNAP TS-109 Pro

David Murphy — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 19:54:32 -0600

We’ll get the bad news out of the way first. QNAP’s TS-109 Pro NAS device is more an enclosure than a NAS box–the storage part of the equation is BYO. Thankfully, NAS devices’ speeds are primarily determined by the connection and the interface of the device itself–purchase a decent hard drive, you’ll be sticking it into one of the fastest NAS boxes we’ve tested.

That said, we’re impressed with the features packed in this enclosure. And boy, what a list! A veritable cornucopia of network-attached storage, the TS-109 functions as a file server, a backup server, a web server, a media server, and a download server. Throughout our testing, we found that each element was as easy to use and helpful as the others. In fact, some were downright awesome: The file downloading application is a great alternative to keeping a loud, energy-sucking computer on overnight. But that’s just a single example. There’s no poison apple in the TS-109’s bucket of features.

We did have a bit of trouble getting the included installation CD to work. But once the “find my NAS device” application installs, accessing the TS-109 isn’t too taxing a process. Again, we had trouble browsing to the device in our network, but after typing in the TS-109’s name in the address bar (\\test, in this case), it appeared without fuss.

It’s a minor deficit in an otherwise useful device. No, not just useful–extraordinary. We have yet to find a NAS box that’s as speedy and feature-packed as this one, so much so that it makes the lack of an accompanying hard drive quite forgivable.

Seagate eSATA External Hard Drive

Josh Norem — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 17:47:56 -0500

We’ve been waiting several years for eSATA (external SATA, that is) to show up. This month we’re happy to see the first eSATA drive actually arrive to market. If you’re looking for an external backup drive that’s much faster than a standard USB or FireWire drive, Christmas has come early.

Now, astute readers will probably say “Maximum PC, don’t pull my leg. You reviewed an external SATA drive back in June 2004.” OK, you got us on that one, but that CMS Velocity drive wasn’t a true external SATA drive (it didn’t adhere to the official eSATA specification).

The Seagate eSATA drive, however, is the real deal. It uses an actual external SATA cable, which is thick and shielded to protect against interference. The 5-foot-long cable plugs into the included Promise eSATA controller, which runs at SATA 3G speeds and rides the PCI bus.
The big news with this drive is that rather than riding the pokey USB or FireWire bus (as other external drives do), it runs on SATA, and the difference shows in the benchmarks. On average, the eSATA drive runs almost twice as fast as a comparable USB drive, in both read and write speed, which is incredible. Its access times are much slower than the same model internal drive, however, hovering in the mid-20 millisecond range.

There’s only one problem: We had trouble with the included backup software. It’s BounceBack Express from CMS, which we’ve found plenty capable in the past. But the UI has been revamped to give it a fresh look, and the new version crashed repeatedly on our test system.
Seagate’s eSATA drive is the fastest backup drive available, and you can even stack several drives on top of each other and run them in RAID array if you have an eSATA RAID controller. It’s hurt only by the fact that a single drive’s 500GB capacity is middling, and the software is buggy.

Month Reviewed: November 2006

Verdict: 8

URL: www.seagate.com