Is there a USB SATA controller?

[CSMR]

Is there a USB3 adapter that can take SATA drives and make them act as SATA drives on Windows?

I have used USB3 drives before and USB3-SATA adapters but they do not act as normal SATA drives. They do not obey Windows settings for SATA drives, spinning up and down at the wrong times.

I am on an SFF computer and unfortunately it does not have an expresscard slot.

 

[Painman]

>I am on an SFF computer

Limit your expectations accordingly.

>I have used USB3 drives before and USB3-SATA adapters but they do not act as normal SATA drives. They do not obey Windows settings for SATA drives, spinning up and down at the wrong times.

Because they're effectively USB drives, not SATA.

Edit: Effectively

 

[Flapdrol1337]

With ssd's the spinning up and down at the wrong time shouldn't be a problem.

 

[Sheep221]

SATA drive connected via USB is seen in system as mass storage device, just like USB stick, phone or memory card, it's not a SATA hard disk once you connect it via USB. There shouldn't be much problem with the aforementioned if you don't want to install OS with its master boot partition on USB drive, in this sense you need thrid party software that will create bootable partition and boot record with drivers recongnizable by OS installer.

 

[CSMR]

The problem is spinups and spindowns not being controlled by standard OS settings, causing lag during spinup and noise at the wrong times. Having to buy multiple terabytes of SSDs is not a good solution.
Is there a reason that USB is unable to emulate SATA?
Or ignoring obeying the SATA interface, are there USB drives or enclosures where spinup and spindown can be controlled?

 

[corkyg]

Seems to me that your best alternative might be a NAS attached to your SFF's network port.

 

[LurchFrinky]

Windows treats USB drives differently as a form of copy protection - it prevents users from carrying a hard drive around and plugging it in to other computers. Windows licensing effectively states "one license = one computer".
But what are you trying to accomplish that you need multiple TB connected externally to your computer? This is what NAS is for.

 

[CSMR]

Oh so this is a windows problem not a hardware problem? Does windows have an internal mechanism to prevent SATA converters from appearing to the OS as SATA?

Internally I have 512GB OS + 2TB HDD. Externally I have backups, Photography RAW and unprocessed video, media library, 2TB each. Very easy, only SATA doesn't work properly although it's not unmanageable. I don't think anyone will make a silent NAS with latency and performance equal to SATA or USB3, and you would need 10Gbit switches which have not reached consumer switches yet.

Such a shame that eSATA went out of fashion.

 

[Mr Evil]

...Is there a reason that USB is unable to emulate SATA?...

USB has a number of predefined device classes which OSes have built-in drivers for. The mass storage device class (which a hard drive connected via USB will appear as) has a limited set of commands, because it's designed to work with a wide variety of storage devices, not just SATA hard drives.

To make it possible to pass through ATA commands, the adapter would need to be specially designed and a driver would have to be written for it. That's a lot of work for something which doesn't have a lot of demand.

It looks as though it might be possible to do via the relatively new USB Attached SCSI, but I can't find much information about that.

 

[Sheep221]

The problem is spinups and spindowns not being controlled by standard OS settings, causing lag during spinup and noise at the wrong times. Having to buy multiple terabytes of SSDs is not a good solution.
Is there a reason that USB is unable to emulate SATA?
Or ignoring obeying the SATA interface, are there USB drives or enclosures where spinup and spindown can be controlled?

Maybe tampering with USB selective suspend settings could help

 

[yinan]

10Gig switches have reached consumer levels, check out Netgear.
QNap makes some good NAS devices that support 10Gig and SSD.

 

[corkyg]

I have multiple external drives connected to a USB hub with drive power managed by a simple multi-switch box. Thus I turn those drives on and off as I want them to and I don't worry about spinups, etc. BTW, eSATA may be out of fashion, but I still use it.

 

[WilliamM2]

I still prefer eSata for external drives too, you get the same performance as any directly connected sata drive. Out of fashion? It's still available on hundreds of external enclosures, and eSata adapters are usually included with them, or you can get them at Monoprice or Amazon for less than a $1.