e-SATA and a laptop

[Barb O]

Is an e-SATA connection likely to be available on a laptop?
I am shopping for a new laptop with Windows XP - perhaps a Dell.

This week, Costco has a coupon special on the Western Digital external hard drives and the 500GB that I purchased at my local store includes e-SATA capability. I do not recollect seeing laptops saying they have e-SATA capability. However, it would seem to be a better performance choice than USB when using an external hard drive for video and photo files referenced from Premiere or Photoshop Elements.

[Chuck Engels]

Hi Barb,
Capturing to a external USB drive connected to a laptop works fine, don't know that you need eSata.
I just upgraded my laptop internal drive to a 160GB 7400rpm SATA drive, much nicer.
I can now capture to the internal drive and then move the files to my external drive if I wanted to.
Get the biggest 7400rpm internal SATA drive you can, that will really make a difference

[Bob]

I expect that sometime in the future, e-sata will be much more common. But,so far, I've only heard of one laptop with e-sata built-in. That's the Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Xi2528. However, there are PCMCIA and Express adapter cards available that provide two e-sata ports. I don't know how well these cards work though.

[jackfalbey]

Hi Barb,

I use 2 Western Digital eSATA HDDs with my Precision m6300 laptop, connected through a PNY ExpressCard http://reviews.cnet.com/i-o-cards/pny-e ... 40489.html and it works great! I tested it with HDTune, and they get 65MB/sec average data transfer rate, compared to 51MB/sec for the laptop's internal 7200RPM drive, and not too far behind the RAID0 in my desktop at 85MB/sec. USB external drives generally get around 20MB/sec. It really speeds up file transfers, encoding, copying, etc.

Go for the PNY card; I tried a Siig card from Dell and found out after 2 days of headaches that the Siig drivers are incompatible with the Dell hardware. The PNY also uses a Siig chipset, but the drivers are different and don't conflict with the Dell.

Also keep in mind that eSATA isn't hot-pluggable, so you have to use the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in the System Tray or connect/disconnect while the laptop is shut down. It also helps to reformat the drives to NTSC, but be sure to copy over the WD pre-installed software before formatting, because you will need the WD Button Manager app to keep the drive sync'ed with the laptop. And be sure to set the drive for "Optimize for Quick Removal" under the "Policies" tab in the drive's "Properties". This will prevent write-caching which can lead to crashing and severe data loss if a cable becomes disconnected while the drive is in use.

All in all, eSATA with a laptop isn't as simple as USB, but it is a heck of a lot faster! If you're going to use your laptop as an editing rig, eSATA is definitely the way to go.

[Chuck Engels]

Great information, thanks Jack and Bob

[Bobby]

...eSATA isn't hot-pluggable...

I think you might be mixing two different things here, and might be wrong about the hot plug.

Hot plug is the ability to plug and unplug the device while the power is on. I do believe eSATA is hot pluggable, but have to check further.

Using the Safely Remove Hardware icon is needed when the device uses delayed writes. This means that writing to the drive returns an immediate response so the application can go on, while the system completes the writes later. By using Safely Remove Hardware you signal the system to complete all outstanding writes so the drive can be removed without compromising the file system.

Not the same things...

Bob

[Bobby]

I have done a bit of reading and still don't have the definitive answer.

I believe that electrically eSata can be hot plugged - i.e. you can plug it in and out at any time. But the issue seems to be whether the drivers support the Safely Remove Hardware or not. A device that is hot plug and uses delayed writes should signal Windows to place an entry in the SRH list. It seems that some eSATA drivers do not do that.

So, you may be able to physically plug it in, but if you unplug it there could be problems.

My recommendation: Plug it in and see if an entry is posted into the SRH list. If so, it should be fine to unplug it at any time provided you first use SRH to notofiy Windows. If you do not see it in the list, then assume that the drivers don't support that, and you can't unplug. Then it would only be safe to shutdown the PC and then unplug.

Bob

[jackfalbey]

From Western Digital's website:

Important: Connecting or disconnecting an eSATA drive requires you to shut the computer down before connecting or disconnecting the drive.

Connecting the drive:
A FireWire or USB drive can be hot-plugged. This means that you may connect the drive to the system with the system turned on. It is recommended that you hot-plug the drive while the system is in an idle state, so that critical operations will not be interrupted.

and

Please follow the directions below to connect your WD My Book Premium ES Edition hard drive to a PC or Macintosh computer system using eSATA.

Important: When using the eSATA connector, this device does not support hot swapping (connecting and disconnecting while the computer system is running). Please Shut down the computer system before plugging in the WD My Book Premium ES Edition hard drive.


Please ensure that the computer system is turned off.


Plug the AC adaptor into an electrical outlet.


Connect the other end of the adaptor into the DC power supply socket located on the back of the hard drive.


Connect one end of the eSATA cable to the hard drive and the other end of the eSATA cable into the computer system's eSATA port.


Power on the computer system. During the boot process, the hard drive will power on automatically.
Note: You may need to access the computer BIOS and ensure that the computer is booting to the original internal hard drive. The computer will most likely have the ability to boot to this hard drive if connected through eSATA.


For Windows Operating Systems, once the computer system is booted to Windows, the WD My Book Premium ES hard drive will be shown in My Computer and Windows Explorer.

For Macintosh Operating Systems, once the computer system is booted, the drive will power on automatically and will mount to the desktop.

Please follow the directions below to disconnect your WD My Book Premium ES Edition hard drive to a PC or Macintosh computer system using eSATA.

Important: When using the eSATA connector, this device does not support hot swapping (connecting and disconnecting while the computer system is running). Please Shut down the computer system before unplugging the WD My Book Premium ES Edition hard drive.


Please ensure that any files residing on the WD My Book Premium ES Edition hard drive are closed and no programs are accessing the hard drive.


For Windows Operating Systems, shut the computer system down by clicking on Start and then Shut Down.

For Macintosh Operating Systems, click on the Apple icon and then click on Shut Down.


Once the computer has been shut down, the WD My Book Premium ES Edition hard drive can be disconnected from the eSATA and power cables.

[jackfalbey]

I may well be misusing and/or misunderstanding the terminology. I'm learning as I go with these new technologies...

My ideas about eSATA are based on trial and error with my own system. I have found that contrary to WDs own FAQ, I can connect an eSATA drive while the laptop is on, as long as the drive was disconnected using Safely Remove Hardware (I should mention that I select the PNY ExpressCard rather than the drive itself for this procedure). Also, if the drive was connected to my desktop (while disconnected from my laptop, of course) via USB and file changes were made on it, the laptop will sometimes fail to recognize it without a reboot, wherein the laptop claims the drive is "dirty" and runs chkdsk to fix it.

I came across the Optimize for Quick Removal and Safely Remove Hardware procedure after an early attempt to disconnect the drive while the laptop was on using Device Manager. I don't know exactly what I did, but that drive is entirely unrecognizeable by the laptop now, either by USB or eSATA. The desktop still recognizes it by USB, but the laptop will not acknowledge its presence by any means I can think of. So I now have another external USB for the desktop. If you have any thoughts on that, I'd love to hear them Bob...

[Bobby]

Well, I'll say this:

If in fact eSATA does NOT support plug and play, that is a very significant mistake, and will definitely tilt the scales to USB 3.0 when it comes out. No plug and play throws the technology back ten years or so.

Being experienced with the convoluted logic that product developers (or, worse, product planners) use, somebody probably wanted to have eSATA transparent to SATA - since SATA does not support (or HAVE to support) plug and play, than eSATA should not also.

Big mistake...

Bob

[jackfalbey]

Well, as I found from my trial-and-error, you can connect/disconnect eSATA without shutting down the computer (contrary to the manufacturer's specs); but there are specific steps you have to take to avoid problems (the manufacturers may not be aware of the workaround I came up with). So it's not true plug-and-play like USB, but for the performance boost over USB I think it's worth the trouble...

[Bobby]

...but for the performance boost over USB I think it's worth the trouble...

Til USB 3.0...

Bob

[jackfalbey]

Til USB 3.0...

I'm all for it, but how long will it be before it's available and the bugs are worked out?

[Bob]

SATA (and eSATA) is designed to support hot swapping under AHCI. You need an AHCI compatible system with a chipset on your motherboard that supports it, support in the bios, and support in the OS with drivers that provide the functionality. See this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_H ... _Interface

[jackfalbey]

The m6300 has options for ATA and AHCI in its BIOS, but comes with ATA selected by default. A quick glance at the Wikipedia article suggests all kinds of problems that may arise after switching, and I'm hesitant to do anything that might cause the laptop to stop working since it's my main editing rig at this time...

At least I have found an alternative way to make it work, and it works very well now. As long as I use Safely Remove Hardware to disconnect, it basically is hot-pluggable, after making the changes noted above. So I have to correct my statement: eSATA IS hot-pluggable IF certain steps are taken, otherwise you may (probably will) experience all sorts of problems. Again, I'm learning as I go, and some of my "solutions" may be incorrect and/or unnecessary, but this is what worked for me on Western Digital drives:

-Connect the eSATA drive while the computer is off, then boot up
-Open the drive in Windows Explorer and copy the WD pre-installed software
-Reformat the drive to NTFS in Disk Management
-Set the drive to "Optimize for Quick Removal"
-Re-copy the WD software back to the eSATA drive and run it

You can now connect/disconnect the eSATA drive just like a USB drive, except for the extra step of Safely Remove Hardware.

As far as the WD software, I don't like having anything that isn't necessary running on my laptop, but without the WD Button Manager the eSATA drive will sometimes go into a hibernation-like state in the middle of rendering/encoding which causes Premiere/Encore to freeze up. I'm not sure exactly why, but Button Manager keeps this from happening.

I hope all of this helps you tech-minded guys understand eSATA a little better. My technical knowledge is just a step above changing a light bulb (I used to fix disk read errors on my Commodore 1541 floppy drive by dropping it on the floor from a height of about 3 feet Hey, it worked...)