Anyone have experience with eSATA?

TerraMortim

TerraMortim

New member
Looks really cool, and not that expensive... Has anyone tried this with success in recording? Would love to put more hard drives in my G5, but all the drive bays are full...so this would, I think, be a better solution than yet another firewire or usb2 enclosure.
 
TerraMortim said:
Looks really cool, and not that expensive... Has anyone tried this with success in recording? Would love to put more hard drives in my G5, but all the drive bays are full...so this would, I think, be a better solution than yet another firewire or usb2 enclosure.
Click to expand...

They are the same as internal sata drives as far as speed. no? My sata drives SMOKE!
 
TerraMortim said:
Looks really cool, and not that expensive... Has anyone tried this with success in recording? Would love to put more hard drives in my G5, but all the drive bays are full...so this would, I think, be a better solution than yet another firewire or usb2 enclosure.
Click to expand...

Should be lower latency than FireWire or USB2, and a lot less CPU intensive than USB2. For normal use, the first makes no difference and the second makes some difference. For audio use, though, latency can be critical, depending on your DAW, and CPU overhead is almost always important.

I'd certainly go with an eSATA drive if I needed more space for recording. The one feature I wish we'd see in new Macs is built-in eSATA ports. I'd settle for FireWire 3200, though. :D
 
cool thanks guys. I think I'll go that way...desperately need more hd space with this bloody album I'm working on (it's allready taking up about 250gb of space and I'm not finished mixing it yet...EEEEEEK!) It drives me nuts, cause I have 3 or 4 sata drives just sitting in my closet, but no room or controllers enough for more drives...and I don't want to overheat my machine by getting one of those drive bracket things... sounds like eSATA is the thing for me...love the internal SATA drives.
 
I did some recording recently on a rig with an eSATA drive, recording about 14 tracks in a pass. It was not a smooth session, but I think it had more to do with the Motu interfaces than the eSATA drive. I did find the software frequently waiting for that drive though, and I could hear the drive spinning up in the cans. I mention it in passing, not as a warning against using eSATA, as it was clearly a poorly configured DAW.
 
Ive done 100 tracks on eSATA smoothly. Sonnet eSATA controller with Icy Dock bay and a Seagate 32MB Cache Perpindicular 500GB Barracuda drive. It works exactly the same as internal SATAII, benchmark-wise.
 
Keep in mind the some external drives on th4e market are sata drives, but do not necesarily use the esata format for communicating with your computer. Make sure that both your motherboard and the drive you will be using each have eSATA jacks and support:)
 
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