CMS 80GB Velocity SATA External Drive

[Suhit Gupta]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1569526,00.asp' target='_blank'>http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1569526,00.asp</a><br /><br /></div>"Back in the twentieth century, the only alternative to SCSI for external hard drives was a parallel port, which was deadly slow. Then came USB and FireWire drives. Both are a vast improvement over parallel-port drives, but even a FireWire port can't move data as fast as a hard drive can read and write. The new CMS 80GB Velocity SATA Automatic Backup System ($299 direct) offers to solve that problem. This external Serial ATA (SATA) drive costs more than an equivalent FireWire drive, but the performance blows a FireWire drive away."<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/CMS80.jpg" /><br /><br />If you don't have an SATA controller on your motherboard, you can get one from CMS for $39. Clearly the guys at PCWorld have been blown away by the performance of this device. This is great solution because for just $299, you get an additional drive that supports a serial ATA connection which gives the high speed transfers (that you can also use for backups) and also lets you boot from the drive if your internal drive fails. However, this does come at the price that installation of the drive is not as simple as a plug and play USB/Firewire external hard drive.

[Jason Dunn]

Very interesting...so I guess the question now becomes when will we get SATA ports on the outside of our computers? Personally I think there would need to be a re-vamp of the connector before they can go external - even the slightest tug will disloge a SATA connector, which really sucks. It blows me away that this next-gen protocol is so fast, yet the connector they made is so lame. :roll:

[James Fee]

So why SATA over Firewire? I don't see any real reason. Firewire support is finally available on many platforms, so I can't imagine how external SATA would get over that.

[Jason Dunn]

So why SATA over Firewire?

"but the performance blows a FireWire drive away"

Performance is an important thing for many people. ;-) That said, I've never found anything that saturates the Firewire 400 bandwidth, so I'm wondering how this speed manifests itself with SATA...

[James Fee]

But what about Firewire 800? At least that spec is compatible with existing Firewire devices.

[Jason Dunn]

But what about Firewire 800? At least that spec is compatible with existing Firewire devices.

Good question - I noticed in that article that they did a speed comparison between USB 2.0 and SATA, but they didn't publish any numbers for Firewire 400...so it's a little hard to say what the results would be. Firewire 800 is only available on Macs right now I believe, so that wouldn't be a straight comparison. Still, it would be nice to know where SATA ranks against Firewire 800!

[James Fee]

A quick google search found this...

http://www.barefeats.com/hard35.html

Not sure how scientific it was, but at least we can see a representation.