APIOTEK DUAL eSATA II with RAID Express Card Adapter
Introduction
Hard drive enclosures have been around for quite a while now and companies are coming out with newer and sleeker looking designs all the time. The competition is quite fierce so to keep ahead of one another we see newer technologies being incorporated into these small devices. One of the hottest talks in the town right now when talking about external enclosures is eSATA capability.
If you haven’t been following the technological developments lately eSATA (External Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) is an external interface for SATA technology. Internal SATA drives have pretty much completely taken over the old ATA drives, yet until eSATA standard came out external hard drive enclosure manufactures were unable to take advantage of the benefits SATA drives offered as all external drives were limited to USB connectivity. With eSATA coming out we have seen an explosion of these external enclosures coming out with eSATA capability. The main advantage of eSATA is its speed and the chart below pretty much sums it all up.
eSATA II which is the newest eSATA standard is just over 6 times the speed of standard USB 2.0. This is extremely impressive and the characteristics of eSATA makes it detect external drives same as an internal drive. And due to the increased speeds on offer, you will not see any difference in speeds from internal hard drives as they operate almost at the same speeds.
An interesting feature eSATA also offers is the port multiplier. This allows a single eSATA connector to be used to connect an external eSATA enclosure that is capable of having multiple drives in an array. There are few manufactures coming out with such enclosures but they are not that wide spread as yet. Await our review on one of these devices however in a few weeks time.
External hard drive enclosures are designed primarily with portability in mind, so if you’re a laptop user you must wonder how you can take advantage of this eSATA standard. This is where Apiotek’s DUAL eSATA II with RAID Express Card Adapter comes into play. At present PC manufactures don’t provide native support to eSATA so you need to get an external adapter to connect to an eSATA device.
What makes Apiotek’s DUAL eSATA II with RAID Express Card Adapter quite interesting is due to its ability to connect up to two eSATA hard drive enclosures at the same time. On top of that it also supports RAID 0, RAID 1 or JBOD RAID making it quite a unique device in the market right now.
