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Introduction
We seemed to be talking about it for an eternity
but at last we're seeing mass adoption of Serial-ATA
(SATA from here on in) from motherboard and chipset
manufacturers and there are even a fair few SATA hard
drives trickling onto the market too. But no sooner
have we all learned the latest must-know acronym than
Highpoint come along and supply a variation on it........e.SATA!
So what's e.SATA when it's at home? Fortunately it's
all very simple and straight forward, the rougue "e"
prefix simply means "external" and is the
name HighPoint have given to their method for taking
the SATA standard and making it available on a bracket
to external devices.
So why bother? Well, take a look at how SATA's data
transfer rates compare to the already established
USB and FireWire standards.
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USB 1.1
|
12 Mbps
|
1.5 MB/Sec
|
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FireWire (IEEE 1394)
|
400 Mbps
|
50 MB/Sec
|
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USB 2.0
|
480 Mbps
|
60 MB/Sec
|
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e.SATA
|
1.5 Gbps
|
187.5 MB/Sec
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Clearly the overwhelming thing is SATA's favour is
its impressive data transfer rate. At over 185 MB/sec
this is over three times the performance of USB 2.0
which should make it ideally suited to cope with the
theoretical burst data speeds of current generation
hard drives, far more so than either USB or Firewire
neither of which on paper can handle an ATA66 hard
drive at theoretical peak burst let alone ATA100 or
ATA133.
There are three products I want to look at today
though you'll only need to ever buy two of them to
be up and running. Which two depends on your motherboard.
Let's take a roll call:
B11
Bracket Kit
B11 Kit Contents:
- 1 External SATA Bracket
- 1 External SATA cable
- User's Manual
B11 Features:
- Large LBA support (drives larger than 137GB)
- Supports SATA transfer rates up to 150MB/s
- Bootable disk support (when used with Rocket series
SATA controllers)
- Compatible with Windows and Linux OS: Win98, ME,
Win2k, NT, XP, Caldera, Red Hat, Turbo, SuSE, FreeBSD
Rocket
1511
Kit Contents:
- 1 Rocket 1511 card
- Driver software
- User's Manual
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Host
side interface
|
32bit
33/66 MHz PCI |
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Number
of IDE channels
|
1
Channel |
|
Supported
Hard drives
|
SATA
hard disk drives, IDE hard disk drives (ATA133/100)
|
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Supported
OSs
|
Windows
98/ME, Windows NT4.0, Win2000, Windows XP, Linux
(Turbo, Caldera, RedHat, SuSE), Free BSD
|
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Maximum
Data Throughput
|
150MB/s
|
|
BIOS
Function
|
Drive
Configuration and Managemen |
|
Plug
and Play
|
Yes
|
|
Misc.
Functions
|
Bootable
disk support |
| Large
LBA support capacity exceeding 137GB |
RocketMate
1000
Kit
Contents:
- 1 RocketMate
1000 disk enclosure
- 1 External SATA cable
- Power Adapter
- User's Manual
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Outer Case size
|
176mm x 127mm x 40mm |
|
Inner Case size
|
Fits 3.5" factory hard disk drives |
|
Power Supply
|
AC input: 100-240V
AV, 50-60Hz
DC output: 12V @ 1.7A |
|
Interface
|
e.SATA™ (external Serial ATA) to IDE |
|
Supported hard drives
|
Parallel IDE ATA hard disk drives |
About HighPoint Technologies, Inc.
I can't imagine there are many of you who haven't
heard of HighPoint Technologies, the name behind the
RAID chips found on some of the world's best loved
motherboards. Located in California's Silicon Valley
their primary busines is manufacturing Ultra DMA/ATA
and RAID controllers.
Okay, enough small-talk already, let's get a closer
look.
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