Author: Mikhail Ivanenkov Date: December 16, 2007 Manufacturer: Apiotek Provider: Apiotek

Testing, Conclusion » Page 1: Introduction, Product Details

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The great thing about removable storage is you can take it anywhere. Flash drives and even smaller 2.5" drives require nothing more than an empty USB port or two and voila - data at your fingertips. However both of these storage methods are still limited in their capacities and are significantly more expensive per-gigabyte than their full sized brethren. To have a truly mobile library, a more spacious 3.5" drive is required. Nowadays enclosures all fit the USB2.0 standard, but more and more are beginning to make use of eSATA as well. The latter is just as fast as internal SATA and provided the computer has an eSATA port, data transfer and storage can be done externally with the speed of an internal drive.


However this technology is still quite new when you consider the majority of the PC market. Although a few company-built PCs now include eSATA ports, they are far and few between. Laptops with eSATA connectors are almost nonexistent. The solution? An adapter. Today we'll be looking at Apiotek's eSATA Express Card, a very easy to install adapter that makes use of most newer laptops' Express slots. The Express slot is similar to a PCMCIA slot except it's significantly faster and smaller in size. The maximum throughput is rated at 2.5Gbps. You'll notice this is less than SATAII's 3Gbps, but since no drives are actually that fast the limiting factor will still be the HDD. Apiotek provided an adapter and a reinforced eSATA cable. Both come in the plastic cases shown above.


The package includes the adapter, a reinforced cable, CD with drivers (necessary in this case), and a foldout installation manual. The cable is the best eSATA one I've seen so far. It's a lot thicker than typical ones and the connectors feel sturdier. This is good news since SATA/eSATA plugs aren't as durable as USB.


The adapter slides in and snaps into place no problem. Here it is installed inside a Lenovo ThinkPad T60p. It also has a green LED that flashes whenever there's activity.


After you install the drivers, you'll need to reboot, plug in the drive, and then you're good to go. The benefit of this over USB are major: transfer speeds via eSATA are easily 2-4x faster than the best USB out there.

For testing I used HD Tach's 8MB Zones benchmark using Vantec's NexStar 3 external enclosure. I compared it to the same enclosure hooked up to a desktop PC as well as the hard drive (a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 80GB) installed internally in a PC using SATA. The results are as follows.

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