Mobile computer users often find that ultra portable computer systems lack
optical drives and use hard drives that are smaller than what might be
ideal for the sake of portability and longer battery life. Often the best thing
these types of users can do is use external optical drives and external HDDs
that are connected via USB.
While the USB interface is practical, it isn’t always the fastest
interface for transferring large amounts of data. The preferable connection
type for moving large amounts of data is via SATA and eSATA ports. These ports
are common on virtually all modern computer systems and SATA is used for both
storage devices as well as optical drives.
The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) announced it plans
to have a new specification
ready this year called Power Over eSATA (PDF) that will provide
power to external optical and storage drives via the eSATA connector. The goal
of the specification is to not only provide power to a device over SATA, but to
maintain the much faster 3GB/s data throughput. SATA-IO says that products
using Power Over eSATA could be available on the market by the second half of
2008.
"Its [SATA's] fast transfer rate and
efficient protocol makes eSATA the highest-performing external mainstream
storage connection,” said Knut Grimsrud, SATA-IO president and Intel Fellow.
“Enhancing eSATA with power delivery will provide a new level of convenience to
the designer and the end user. By eliminating the need for a separate power
connection, customers can more easily expand their storage, making Serial ATA
an even more attractive solution for mainstream storage applications.”
With the additional bandwidth and power-over-bus, eSATA could easily replace USB in several applications outside of storage.