Anyone Seen or Heard of a Laptop w/External SATA Port?

[corkyg]

Just wondering if anyone has heard of a laptop that features an external SATA port/ Many of the new ones, even Core-Duo, have internal SATA drives.

Firewire and USB seem to be the only current links to external HDDs for laptops. Why not a SATA link? An external SATA data port would be really useful for an external drive and case that had its own power source, i.e., A/C cord.

The first laptop that features this will probably be my next acquisition.

 

[Brainonska511]

They probably aren't prevalent yet on notebooks since external SATA ports are just making their way onto desktop motherboards now. Also, at the moment, only hard drives can be hooked up to SATA ports, while firewire and USB can be used for a variety of devices, making it much more practical to include additional USB or Firewire ports instead of throwing a SATA port on the outside of the notebook.

 

[gaidin123]

I bought a cheap pcmcia SATA adapter similar to this one Here

Newegg has a bunch of them including expresscard ones. Most (all?) of them seem to be the normal sata ports rather than the real esata ones but you can just buy an adapter cable I believe if your external drive has an esata port.

Gaidin

 

[fbrdphreak]

Yep you're thinking of eSATA. I recently got a Vantec 3.5" eSATA/USB enclosure and their eSATA PCMCIA card since I switched to my Thinkpad T42 as my primary machine. It works great and is very fast. I'll be doing a full review soon

 

[AmigaMan]

Originally posted by: fbrdphreak
Yep you're thinking of eSATA. I recently got a Vantec 3.5" eSATA/USB enclosure and their eSATA PCMCIA card since I switched to my Thinkpad T42 as my primary machine. It works great and is very fast. I'll be doing a full review soon

Come on man!!! The wife has cleared the funds for Amigaman's eSATA-based backup solution and I'm close to making a decision. There's quite a few enclosures out there, Vantec's, Azio's, and my personal favorite the OWC Mercury Elite-AL which includes eSATA, FW400, 2 FW800, and USB2.0 connections. Unfortunately the OWC is more than twice as expensive as the Vantec and Azio enclosures.

As to the OP, no laptop I know of comes with an eSATA connection. There are some ExpressCard/34 adaptors starting to trickle out that have eSATA: Firmtek, Vydeo, and Sabrent all make them. FWIW, I sent an email to Sabrent asking if their eSATA ExpressCard/34 adaptor would support Macs and they responded "most likely not".

 

[corkyg]

I guess we still wait. PCMCIA is not a good solution because of the miserable data throughput rate. Maybe not as good as Firewire. The only devices needing highspeed are external HDDs - primarily for backup and mass data storage.

The space required for an external SATA port on a laptop is not much bigger than a USB port, and it would be much faster.

 

[fbrdphreak]

Originally posted by: AmigaMan

Originally posted by: fbrdphreak
Yep you're thinking of eSATA. I recently got a Vantec 3.5" eSATA/USB enclosure and their eSATA PCMCIA card since I switched to my Thinkpad T42 as my primary machine. It works great and is very fast. I'll be doing a full review soon

Come on man!!! The wife has cleared the funds for Amigaman's eSATA-based backup solution and I'm close to making a decision. There's quite a few enclosures out there, Vantec's, Azio's, and my personal favorite the OWC Mercury Elite-AL which includes eSATA, FW400, 2 FW800, and USB2.0 connections. Unfortunately the OWC is more than twice as expensive as the Vantec and Azio enclosures.

As to the OP, no laptop I know of comes with an eSATA connection. There are some ExpressCard/34 adaptors starting to trickle out that have eSATA: Firmtek, Vydeo, and Sabrent all make them. FWIW, I sent an email to Sabrent asking if their eSATA ExpressCard/34 adaptor would support Macs and they responded "most likely not".

I'm going to be doing some major data transferring before I get to the actual review testing, want me to time some large file transfers for you to get an idea?

 

[AmigaMan]

Originally posted by: fbrdphreak

Originally posted by: AmigaMan

Originally posted by: fbrdphreak
Yep you're thinking of eSATA. I recently got a Vantec 3.5" eSATA/USB enclosure and their eSATA PCMCIA card since I switched to my Thinkpad T42 as my primary machine. It works great and is very fast. I'll be doing a full review soon

Come on man!!! The wife has cleared the funds for Amigaman's eSATA-based backup solution and I'm close to making a decision. There's quite a few enclosures out there, Vantec's, Azio's, and my personal favorite the OWC Mercury Elite-AL which includes eSATA, FW400, 2 FW800, and USB2.0 connections. Unfortunately the OWC is more than twice as expensive as the Vantec and Azio enclosures.

As to the OP, no laptop I know of comes with an eSATA connection. There are some ExpressCard/34 adaptors starting to trickle out that have eSATA: Firmtek, Vydeo, and Sabrent all make them. FWIW, I sent an email to Sabrent asking if their eSATA ExpressCard/34 adaptor would support Macs and they responded "most likely not".

I'm going to be doing some major data transferring before I get to the actual review testing, want me to time some large file transfers for you to get an idea?

sure that'd be good info to know. Most of my usage will be backing up images and video files. Plus since my MBP is running low of HD space, I'll be installing games on the external drive when I'm in Windows. I'm hoping that an external eSATA-attached 7200RPM drive is at least as fast as an internal 5400RPM drive.

 

[cheesehead]

SIIG makes a dual-port SATA-II card, if I recall. It's ExpressCard, though.

With an ExpressCard interface, an external drive should blow an internal drive away. Remember, there's no bridge or adapter for SATA devices, unlike most FireWire and USB drives.