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Akasa makes eSATA drive right and cheap
Theoretically eSATA is almost four times faster but in the reality it is only slightly faster.
Akasa has made a sleek Integral 3.5 inch eSATA USB 2.0 hard drive case and wants to give you the pleasure of using your eSATA drive with your eSATA board. The bad thing about is that not every board, actually only high end boards have eSATA ports at the moment. Well, you are still fine as this hard drive case can be connected via USB 2.0 or slower.
The thing that we dislike about 3.5 inch external drives is you need a power supply to keep them going. The small, nice but more expensive 2.5 inch hard drives don't need an external power source and can be stored in your pocket. Still there is a good thing about 3.5 inch drives and one of them is that you can go out and buy 320 GB drive for less than €100 or around £75 in the UK. The smaller drives get even cheaper and this enclosure will handle the good old IDE drives.
Assembling the drive is easy as beans. We tried with an IDE drive first as this was the first free that we could find around here and after a few minutes of playing with a screwdriver we put it all together. There is a bad thing if you use IDE drive, you can simply forget about eSATA as it won't work. The IDE drive works via USB only. Once you plug a drive inside, you power it via the adaptor, plug it in a PC and it gets recognized a plug an play hard drive. You are ready to rock and roll.
When you want to switch from IDE to SATA you use a different power cable included in the package and this won't cause much trouble. You connect a SATA drive via small SATA cable and screw the enclosure back. The drive is ready.
First thing you notice is the Integral SATA blue LED that lights the front of the enclosure, a really nice touch. The back of the enclosure has a power switch, a power cable, eSATA port, USB 2.0 port and a switch which determines whether you work in USB 2.0 or eSATA mode. The enclosure is made of nice aluminium and looks stylish. It is not that easy to replace the drive once inserted as the cables might stack but you probably won't be doing this regularly anyway.
The eSATA cable is a bit different from SATA looks more expensive and the connectors are nicer and unfortunately not compatible with SATA internal cables. You plug the cable into your eSATA port on the board and it will work, as though it is an internal drive. Basically eSATA is a way to connect an external drive and make it act as an internal one. It still works at 1.5 Gb/s while SATA II can handle twice that at 3.0 Gb/sec transfer, but yet again this is all theoretical and unreachable numbers.
The drive works under Windows XP and Vista RC2 and it should work with Windows 98SE or newer. We are sure that it works under Linux but we didn't get to try it. We tried to copy large files under vista and XP via USB and eSATA and we didn't get that much of a performance difference.
It takes a few seconds before the drive gets recognized but it works well. As we used old SATA Seagate ST312002 drive it gets listed as ST312002 LWDD USB device, when connected to USB.
A strange thing happened with Vista as it worked under RC1 and under reviewed and upgraded RC2 I could not make the drive work. I guess its just windows beta issue as it works really well on RC1 as a plain plug and play device.
Benchmarketing
It takes four seconds to copy a folder with nine MP3 files from a machine to the Akasa eSATA drive. It takes
seven seconds to copy a folder, a few subfolders with 90 files inside all together 16 MB or small files.
It copies a 700 MB AVI file in twenty six seconds and writes with an impressive average speed of 26.9 MB/s. It copies the same file on a hard drive for 25 seconds or 28 MB/sec read speed.
When it comes to small files, MP3 or directories eSATA is almost identical. But it can copy with some 35 MB/s on average and can finish up coping the same file in roughly 20 seconds. It is not much faster but there is a difference.
In Short
AKASA did a great job with this enclosure. It costs just £23.50 in the UK with VAT included and it will handle
any SATA or IDE drive you have. The best of all is that for roughly £100 you can make yourself 320 GB external hard
drive. Available drives on the market usually supports USB and some FireWire but very few eSATA and at last they will
end up a bit more expensive then a do it yourself option. The only problem of these external hard drive enclosures /
cases is that you can see your fingertips on it even if you hands are clean.
The enclosure does the job and if you are fan of 2.5 inch one there is an enclosure for you as well but it will end up being more expensive than the 3.5 option. ?
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