30 January 2009 12:59
tonyrogerson
Best device ever: estata and an external docking station/pcmcia esata card - no more usb 25MBytes/sec - hello 125MBytes/sec
Increasingly new machines have esata ports, these allow you to connect external SATA disks. Until now I've had to use USB to connect external hard drives but USB speed is limited to a poor 25MBytes thereabouts per second which when you are copying GBytes of data around is well poor.
I've got one of these now: http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=222999
Also got a SSD SATA interface disk that I've put into it (ok, I've got a couple of 7,200rpms out of old laptops) - the performance is blinding.
Take my SSD I've just copied a 1GB file from it onto my desktop - the speed - 125Mbytes per second.
Fan-dam-tastic.
The best thing - its hot plug, I turn the docking station off (button on it), slide the disk in, turn it back on and Vista just sees it as another disk :)
I've a new laptop with 2 internal 7,200rpm disks in RAID 0 so I've got the speed there now to run VM's but, if you haven't got that luxury and/or carry your VM's around on sata disks - look into esata instead of USB; you can get a PCMCI card (http://www.maplin.co.uk/module.aspx?moduleno=48643) that you can hook directly up to your SATA drive (SSD?).
I love Maplin - truely love it :)
Tony.
Filed under: Chewing the fat