Entry tags:

esata, storage, usb

Portable storage.
Dilemma. I need some portable storage device, but all the USB/Firedire ones seem to be made of fail. But whilst searching, I found this thing which raised some questions.

• The obvious one - what's up with the bamboo?
  
  
• What the hell is Turbo USB?
  
  Asides from "25% faster than a USB 2.0 connection", it doesn't really say. So I poked around the interwebs a bit.
  The best I've been able to dig up so far, is buffalo claiming a 60% speed increase over USB2 (wait, 60% ? hmm), and this speculation
  that it's just a cache that sits between the host and the USB->SATA bridge. From a little searching, it seems that a whole
  bunch of vendors now implement this same gimmick, whatever it really is.
  
  
• From reading the comments left by some customers on the amazon page linked above, the "auto-sensing power feature that turns the drive on and off with your computer" doesn't seem to actually work (and that's in those other OS's, good luck getting it work in Linux if it doesn't even work there). This doesn't really surprise me much. I've had many USB/Firewire drive enclosures over the years, and every single one of them has screwed this up. (Most of them make it impossible to use features like SMART too).
  The amusing thing is that of all the enclosures I've had, the electronic parts are nearly always identical.
  So they suffer all the same firmware bugs across vendors, just in different cases, with different flashing lights.

All of this just makes me wonder. Isn't it about time that USB storage died a long overdue death and we all just moved to eSATA?

• It would be faster. No pointless protocol conversion. Transfers running the speed of the SATA link rather than the USB link.
  
• It wouldn't suffer unfixable firmware dumb bugs in protocol conversion.
  
• It would allow access to native features the drive is capable of like ALPM, SMART etc..
  
• Given the addition of ALPM & spindown that works, it would end up using less power.
  

The only thing missing seems to be that hardly any laptops feature eSATA connectors yet.

update:Immediately after posting this, I stumbled across this which is as Kyle McMartin said "a lot of data to accidentally put through the wash". I had no idea they were making usb sticks that big now. I think a handful of these is probably a better option than any usb->ata convertor + rotating media right now.