eSATA!.. is it worth it?

[arthurking83]

eSATA, USB3, Firewire800... whatever!.. is it worth it?

I recently purchased an external eSATA/USB2 enclosure for a drive(2Tb), and have only just started using it in anger.

Speeds are not exactly how I imagined them to be. No problem with read speeds tho.
my first experience with it was good @ 40-45MB/s.

My first experience with writing to it(in anger!).. 250(odd)Gb of files off an external USB2 drive(@1Tb) wasn't too bad. Averaging about 20MB/s.
I'm using Win7's copy and paste displayed transfer speeds as a guide. because there was about 3-5hours of transferring time, I came in and out and did other stuff on the PC concurrently.. just having a quick squizz to see how fast things were travelling along.
My transfer times are not in any way a scientific analysis, just quick observations at any given moment.

Today I transferred another 50G of data from an internal SATA drive, to the eSATA drive again.
Speed started off nicely at 45MB/s for a few minutes(maybe the buffer was doing it's job??), then slowly started to drop, steadily, but worryingly too quickly.
It got to as slow as 16.9MB/s for a long time. Thinking that this was some large group of small files or something, I sat and watched it for a minute or two to see how long it'd last at that speed... I gave up before two mins!(boring! :D).
16.9MB/s is not what I expected at all.

I was hoping for at least 2x USB2 speeds, which I regularly get to 10-12MB/s over a long transfer time.

I realise that transferring via Windows's copy/paste method may not be ideal, and I do have a backup program called RichCopy, which allows multiple threading and stuff like that(which I don't fully understand, but kind'a do!) and using that I can get approx 12-15Mb/s write speeds to one of my 1Tb USB2 drives, which is about 50% full.

I also did a read test, from the eSATA drive back to the internal SATA drive, and got a min 50MB/s. So the drive is fast, and the eSATA interface is also fast enough in read mode.
But!... at a guess, it seems that a realistic write speed would be more like 20MB/s, which is what I have regularly seen(except for that slow '16.9MB/s' stage just a few minutes ago).
I was kind'a hoping to see write speeds more like 1/2 read speeds(ie. at least 25MB/s) and hopefully 30MB/s.
I do get these speeds for small transfers, like a few hundred Mb's or so, but once the amount of data starts to get to 500M or 1G, then thing slow down dramatically.

I think Win7 has a performance indicator tool somewhere that I once saw.. don't how to access it, or if it measures hdd performance. I'll get HDTACH again to do more accurate testing again.

Anyone else have USB/eSATA/FW drives and noticed the performances of the drives?

I've seen USB3 external drives offered for sale. I'm loathe to purchase one, just to find out that the speed advantage is minimal. My motherboard does have USB3 capability too tho.

Are there any tips or tricks, apart from the larger block size, that can help to speed up a hdd?

[I @ M]

Started transferring stuff through usb to the new drive yesterday, I wouldn't have a clue on how many mb/s it was running at but one large folder ( 200gb ) said it was going to take 160 something minutes, I just went away and let it do it's thing. :D

[arthurking83]

Did you use the Windows copy-paste method?
if so, with Win7, there is now the option to see the transfer rate with a 'details' tab which gives a bit more info than the average transferring files message.
One of the details it shows is transfer speeds... quite handy to know!

You know! ;) ..... do I sit and wait :umm: ..... or do I go on holiday for a week ... to Marlo :efelant:

[Kym]

The raw max transfer rate is one thing.
Transfers are limited by whatever is the slowest part of the connection.
Eg. the system disk speed, the external disk speed, what else is running on the PC etc.

[tcdev]

eSATA is exactly the same as SATA; the only difference is the cable shielding, so you should get the same performance.

I'd suspect windows is the culprit. POS.

[I @ M]

Did you use the Windows copy-paste method?
if so, with Win7, there is now the option to see the transfer rate with a 'details' tab which gives a bit more info than the average transferring files message.
One of the details it shows is transfer speeds... quite handy to know!

You know! ;) ..... do I sit and wait :umm: ..... or do I go on holiday for a week ... to Marlo :efelant:



Just the 'move files' on xp, I have enough troubles with cameras let alone computers. :confused013

[gcflora]

I have the standard SATA cables hanging out the back of my computer that I just plug normal SATA drives into :D (Well, I actually have a plate that came with one of my Gigabyte motherboards so they're not just hanging there, but... same diff)

[davidd]

Hi

Just tried copying the same small folder of photos to:
1. eSata 500gB drive - 69 MB/s (using Win 7 details during copy).
2. USB 1TB drive - 16.9 MB/s.

Hope this helps.

[arthurking83]

motherboard has one eSATA plug out the back, which didnt' need connecting to any motherboard SATA ports, and the case I purchased has an eSATA plug as one of the onboard connector types, the motherboard is Firewwire capable, but has no FW ports anywhere, nor were any add on ports supplied.

I just did a 'quick' test using the rear motherboard eSATA port and approx 250G's transferred at approximately 16MB/s(as an average speed, that I noted). Speeds dipped into the 14's on a few occasions and I just gave up waiting after about 3hours and went to bed to leave it to it's own devices.

Normal (internal)SATA speeds seem to be pretty quick... well at least quicker than the 15MB/s that I'm seeing with the eSATA drive at the moment.

I'm going to try one of the case connectors, which are connected to a motherboard SATA port... see how that goes.

Just for kicks!.. using PC Wizard's benchmarking tools, I checked the apparent speeds that each drive is kind of capable of:

main 1Tb Samsung C drive gives:
Sequential Writing : 52.3 MB/s (Cpu usage : 0%)
Sequential Read : 68.65 MB/s (Cpu usage : 5%)
Buffered Writing : 149.08 MB/s (Cpu usage : 6%)
Buffered Reading : 177.66 MB/s (Cpu usage : 6%)
Random Reading : 37 MB/s (Cpu usage : 9%)

One my separate 250G drives(for cache) yields:
Sequential Writing : 64.11 MB/s (Cpu usage : 0%)
Sequential Read : 68.41 MB/s
Buffered Writing : 67.5 MB/s
Buffered Reading : 115.01 MB/s (Cpu usage : 33%)
Random Reading : 54 MB/s (Cpu usage : 35%)

The eSATA drive(2Tb):
Sequential Writing : 113.04 MB/s (Cpu usage : 3%)
Sequential Read : 82.5 MB/s (Cpu usage : 1%)
Buffered Writing : 104.31 MB/s (Cpu usage : 38%)
Buffered Reading : 108.06 MB/s (Cpu usage : 38%)
Random Reading : 36 MB/s (Cpu usage : 33%)

EDIT:
eSATA drive via the case port:
Sequential Writing : 77.13 MB/s (Cpu usage : 0%)
Sequential Read : 106.97 MB/s (Cpu usage : 33%)
Buffered Writing : 120.73 MB/s (Cpu usage : 67%)
Buffered Reading : 136.38 MB/s (Cpu usage : 67%)
Random Reading : 48 MB/s (Cpu usage : 67%)


1Tb USB drive gives:
Sequential Writing : 41.9 MB/s (Cpu usage : 0%)
Sequential Read : 42.72 MB/s (Cpu usage : 3%)
Buffered Writing : 42.76 MB/s (Cpu usage : 37%)
Buffered Reading : 42.99 MB/s (Cpu usage : 37%)
Random Reading : 29 MB/s (Cpu usage : 42%)

I wasn't really seeing this kind of speed, and I think the USB drives were maxing out at about 12MB/s.

Not this is with both Windows file copy method and using RichCopy, which I use for my backups.
RichCopy, which is free, has a ton of configuration options(most of which I don't understand) and one of these is the number of files to search for and copy.
On the USB2 drives, I found that 5 file copy threads seems to max out the bandwidth to that 10-12MB/s rate(viewed on the status bar on RichCopy).

Doing the same with the eSATA drive maxes it out at about 15-16MB/s using the rear motherboard port.

I just disconnected the eSATA cable from the rear port and popped it into one of the case ports(connected directly to a SATA port on the mainboard, and speeds went up.. not by much, 17MB/s lowest, and 18-20 speeds were the norm!... yay!

So I played with the number of simultaneous files copied and varied them from 10-2 files.

@ 10 files per copy, I started seeing 10MB/s down from the much nicer looking 17-10MB/s, so I went the other way, and set the thread numbers down to 5 searches and 2 copies, and now I'm seeing 26-30MB/s on the eSATA drive! :th3:

Now! This is much closer to the 3x speeds I was hoping for on this eSATA drive :D
note! I'm copying these files from the USB2 drive... which has over 4 years worth of photos on it... close to 1Tb :eek:

davidd!.. how large was the file you copied?
I can occasionally see fast speeds even on USB and memory cards, but the files are small.. 20-100Megs or so.
The hdd's buffer size makes a difference for smallish files being transferred too ... and whatever other system buffers are being used.
My speeds are referring to sustained 100's of gigs .. currently 640Gigs being transferred from the USB2 drive .. added to the 230Gigs from the on board SATA drive where my current years worth of photos are stored, which I backed up last night ... I think I need to get a real life! :Doh:

[maccaroneski]

I have an eSata enclosure and just transferred a 2.8 gig file (single file mind you) to the drive in it and got speeds hovering around 80mb/s according to Win 7,after starting out at 95..

Both the source and destination drives are WD Caviar Black 1TB drives, in relation to which my research at the time were amongst the quickest.

[arthurking83]

Thanks Tony!

Ok.. now I'm feeling somewhat deflated again! :(

Have never tried to transfer any single large files across yet.

But I'm curious, have you ever transferred many smaller files(say 25megs each) from many directories in large quantities?

I keep all my images in folder per year shot, and then in sub directories of where and then date and so forth ... many smaller files in many folders seem to slow down the system quite a bit.

I'd be curious as to how fast... say 100Gigs... of photos transferred across ... using whatever process.

I'm also going to look for any new motherboard/SATA drivers that may be available.

[maccaroneski]

I just transferred 10 gig of D90 files (about 10 meg each) and transfer speeds levelled out at around 46.3mb/s. Happy to run any other testing that you might like.

[maccaroneski]

Today I transferred another 50G of data from an internal SATA drive, to the eSATA drive again.
Speed started off nicely at 45MB/s for a few minutes(maybe the buffer was doing it's job??), then slowly started to drop, steadily, but worryingly too quickly.
It got to as slow as 16.9MB/s for a long time.

Here's the issue though Richard....

[arthurking83]

Thanks Rich (and Tony).

I'm not 100% sure on the USB2 read speed being a limitation yet, my first large transfer was directly from a (separate) SATA drive, where I only keep my images. The other separate SATA is for cache and temp files.
With configuring RichCopy to copy only 2 files at a time now, I now see that 26-30MB/s speed.
Last night, reading off the internal SATA drive, I was only seeing 15MB/s average speeds, but that was copying 5 files at a time.
With the USB drive, I didn't really see all that much difference in speed, approximately 2-5MB/s difference between copying 10 files or 2 files concurrently.. ie. approximately 12MB/s to 7MB/s.
That's wayyyy too slow for 640Gigs of data.

One other thing!

does increasing the number of drives in the system slow down the hdd chip in any way.

I have 4 internal drives running at any one time: main drive, photo storage drive, and cache(and temp files) drive: and one other drive used for switching between drives. I find(found) that formatting the cache drive on a regular basis speeds up programs that use the cache drive heavily.
More so CaptureNX, as it uses the drive very heavily with it's large cache files, but same with ViewNX, and to a lesser degree, LR3 and I didn't really get a chance to try it with Bibble5(trial).
I've now got GIMP installed and will see if this program also runs any faster with the cache drive formatted too?
BUT! FWIW, when formatting the cache drive every so often, CaptureNX, my most used program, absolutely flies with respect to displaying the large tiff files it does.

This eSATA 'issue' isn't really an issue as such. Once this lot of files is transferred across, I think I'm safe.
The time difference in how long 640Gigs of data is going to take to backup is going to be significant when I'm doing it at 10MB/s compared to close to 30MB/s.

anyhow.. I downloaded a few new chipset drivers and stuff.. some new OC tools to play with too ;) .. see how it all goes over the next few days!

[arthurking83]

Aha! ahci.. OK.

Last night I downloaded a newer version of AMD's ahci driver thingie.
Installed tonight along with updated drivers... northbridge and other drivers.

Will check the BIOS to see if this is enabled.

Thanks Rich. :th3:

[arthurking83]

.... I'd be inclined to do a bit more reading before trying it though I think... just in case it creates the need for a full reinstall. ;)

AHA!!AHAHAHA!!! :(

well, I should have read the link, but as it was a link to a reg tweak, which I'm generally loathe to do, unless there is a huge advantage, I dismissed it!

my bad!

I subsequently went into the BIOS, to update it, as well as to enable the AHCI feature in the BIOS, and whaddya reckon happened!?

:rolleyes:

PC booted fine for about 5 reboots, and I thought I was safe, except that for some reason, it couldn't find 'available media', and after disconnecting the eSATA drive before booting, it booted perfectly.
Then BAM!.. it stopped.
That link now makes perfect sense.. and only because I can read it now.. for the past two days I've been re installing OSes and stuff :lol:

hindsight is a terrible thing!..

not really a huge drama, as I've been meaning to do a fresh install, since I deleted LightRoom, as my PC slowed down massively since I installed it(must be noted tho, I also updated Syder3 Elite software at the same time, so that could have been a factor).

Got to say tho... newer gen drives really make a huge difference to many apps.
With the new drive I installed everything on, the PC really flew along at light speed.
(FOR NOW ONLY!) I've currently installed everything to a spare 250G WD drive, obviously of older gen specs, and now everything is bound and gagged in large vats of cold molasses on a freezing cold day!... whoa! :Doh:
I'm going to get me a few new drives to play with again, and this current install on the WD250Gig drive is a spare backup if ever anything goes wrong ever again.

NOTE! anyone else thinking of enabling AHCI... heed the warning do not enable it after installation.

Damned couldn't figure out what went wrong a few days ago, and I thought it was me updating AMD drivers, and a few other drivers and software(Bluetooth) and stuff!

now that it's enabled, I'll see if it was 'worth it' :rolleyes:

[gcflora]

Oh well... a fresh install can't hurt so long as you have backups of the non-OS (i.e. personal) files :)

[arthurking83]

LOL! .... I asked you not to tell me that 99!

most stuff wasn't important, but a few things that were important were on my newer drive, that I stupidly(accidentally) formatted before I backed up.

I've lost 3 months worth of pdf format invoices sent to me in emails.. yeooowch!
I have to contact someone at work to resend them all back to me so that I can do my accounting for the year.

Stupidly tho, in the search for speed on this one eSATA drive, which now seems to be twice as fast according to the benchmarking tools in PC Wizard.... up to 70MB/s instead of 36MB/s... my two more important (internal)drives that I use to store images and cache, have both dropped to woeful transfer rates! :confused:

The two 25Gig WD drives(identical) used to transfer @ 50MB/s or more, have now slowed down to 15MB/s according to PC Wizard.
And I see this most vividly when using both CaptureNX and ViewNX. They can now be described as glacial!
File opening times that were instant on the old installation now take 20sec or more to render, and edit times have been similarly affected!

PC seems to run quite quickly tho in many respects.
Programs like Firefox are instant. it opens and renders pages much faster than I last remember it to. But if the program needs to access data on the two separate drives, I have to go pop the kettle on, wait for the kettle to boil, make cups of coffee, bake a batch of cookies, wait for them to cool down, and come back to the PC, where the remainder of the wait doesn't feel so bad... because I now have a cuppa and some cookies to whittle the time away... Oh!.... and then the file suddenly appears on the screen via cnx or VNX, and I can start to edit it :D

LOL! this is only temporary. I now have a decent image of the way the PC is going to be set as a reference point, currently making an image of the installation, and will reinstall it to the faster 1T Samsung drive. I just need to figure out why the two spare 250G WD drives are running so much slower now.
I'm thinking that I should get a pair of WD Black Caviar drives to replace them very soon.
Speed is everything! And when it comes to the two Nikon programs drive speed is vital, otherwise the slow operating speed of the two programs is painfully obvious.

[gcflora]

What are you using to make the disk image? I've used DriveimageXML in conjunction with Bart's PE for a long time now... works great. I've recently gotten Acronis True Image, but I haven't actually done an image restore with that yet

[arthurking83]

I'm just using the Windows(Win7) version of making an image.

When I want to re instate the image onto the next hdd, I just pop in the Windows install CD, hit 'repair' and find the location of the image on one of those slow 250G hdds! :D

It looks to be a bit for bit image of the current install.

I used to use Drive Image(old version) working off a floppy disk, but I have no floppy disk reader installed onto this PC.
The Windows method just seemed easy and convenient for now... slow.... slow as hell, but I want to see how it works out just for now, and if it works well, I'll probably end up sticking with it.


Oh! and I just found out that Samsung's 1Tb HD103SJ drives(which may actually only be 750Gig(??)) seem to have some of the fastest transfer rates.
My 1Tb Samsung is the 'eco green' HD103SI 5400RPM version, which is probably 100MB/s(theoretically) slower.
I'll get two in the next week(@ $80!.. why not? :th3:) and use them to replace the two WD 250g drives.

I'm assuming that with the AHCI change I made to the OS, it may have affected the two WD 250G drives.
Can't see why, but it's the only change I've made to the system.
I need to figure this out before I waste time replacing them with the 1Tb drives.

It really makes a massive difference to how fast the PC works.. more so than upgrading ram from 2Gig to 4Gig that I can see/observe.(on 64bit Win7).

[arthurking83]

On the old system:

I first installed the updated AMD chip sets, one of which was labeled an AHCI driver.. something to do with either the southbridge or northbridge controller driver. made no difference.
Then I enabled the AHCI feature in the BIOS.... from IDE to AHCI.

Windows booted up fine for a few reboots.. as I said maybe 5 maybe more, but I only had one issue with no boot media found with the eSATA drive connected at bootup time.
I disconnected the eSATA cable, and windows booted up fine for the next few starts.
Then I got the same no media boot error after POST, and no booting at all.
Finally disconnected all internal drives(as the BIOS wanted to boot from the eSATA drive and then others) and Windows started to boot, but locked up where the windows logo starts to form.
After multiple attempts and attempts at repairing Windows, I then loaded Win7 again onto the spare 250G drive to try to recover the older installation and files and stuff.. thinking I recovered as much data as i needed.. except the vital business emails!... DOH!... and reformatted the larger faster 1Tb drive.. readying it for the new install of Windows(which I've been meaning to do for a while since I uninstalled a few programs and stuff a while back).

I'll do a bit more checking of what drivers each drive is using, and so far all I know about the system is that it has 6 SATA controllers.. no idea on what drivers/chipsets and how many of each are in use, or being used.

First thing I thought was to rearrange the drives onto different ports to see if there's any difference in speeds too.

[arthurking83]

After more testing, and re-installing(I re-installed, instead of using the backup image).

Loaded the latest drivers from AMD(ATI-Catalyst!? :confused:)
Updated the BIOS to the latest version, which gives a few more config options.
One of the options is to allow changing the SATA transfer mode to/from 3Gb/s, 6Gb/s and Auto.
Reset AHCI to IDE for the two eSATA ports.
There are 4 SATA ports set all together, which you'd expect to connect hdd's too.
And there are 2 more(ie. totaling 6 all up) set on a small raiser, and set pointed forward towards the front of the case for other devices such as SATA optical drives, or in my case, case mounted eSATA case connectors, with one eSATA connector on the rear motherboard panel(too hard to get too, so I prefer to use the case eSATA connectors).

The two once fast, but now slow, drives were always connected to the main set of 4 SATA connectors.
The SATA options in the BIOS are that you can set the SATA to enable or disable, which I gather if set to disable, would then work in IDE mode :confused:
The other SATA option is that you can set the two final SATA ports(5&6) to IDE, Auto, AHCI mode, independently of the 4 main ports.
The 4 main ports were always set to SATA mode(enabled) and I don't think I saw an option for AHCI(prior to the BIOS update).

very strange now that the two slow drives have gone all limp and flaccid.. I'm seeing transfer rates of 10-15MB/s now(according to PCWizard), where initially I was seeing 50MB/s and more.
But the almost identical third WD 250G drive is still seeing the faster transfer rates of 50MB/s.
And all of this is irrespective of which port the drives are mounted too.

The only difference between the two identical WD 250G drives and the third non identical, is part number, and the fact that there is no molex connector on the third one.
I'm assuming that the two identical (...-HBBO) drives are an older design probably IDE drives updated to SATA and the SATA controller is an older(different design) and they just run slower on a proper SATA controller in .. I dunno a proper SATA mode.
The third WD250G drive is a -KLBO model designation, has no molex power connector, and didn't have a pin jumper attached, where the other two did(I now removed, to see if there is any difference.. nope!)
Weird how they worked fast on the older install(and on my other PC, where they did the same duty as storage and cache).. but now they've decided to retire and live life in the slow lane.. painfully slow lane.. to the point where my two main programs are affected by the issue.

Me and my bright ideas huh!? :Doh:

I'm hoping that the PC store as a pair of Samsung F3's, which seem to be exactly what I need now.
Maybe I'll try getting one of them and one Caviar Black to compare, but what I'm seeing on their respective performances on The Tech Report, there's barely anything to separate them.

as a side note.
I've re-installed Win7 on the Samsung 1Tb drive, and even though the difference in performance is 'minimal' according to this PCWizard benchmarking tool, the difference in actual use is significant.
On the WD 250g drive(the faster one) there's a small, but noticeable delay in opening any program of largish size..
ie. something like notepad loads instantly irrespective of hdd used, but a program like CaptureNX2 takes a few seconds(maybe 3 or 5) to load using the WD drive.
It basically explodes on the screen using this 1Tb Samsung.
My current Samsung 1Tb drive is not the F3 model. I have the slower 'green' model(HD103SI).
Whereas I'm going to get two F3(HD103SJ), non green, non eco friendly, gas guzzling, CO2 emitting, 7200RPM industrial strength noise inducing, power houses!... and all to save a few seconds in program load times :p

[Jackaroo]

Hi Arthur
How much memory in the system. Have a look at where the page file is hiding. I have found in the past, moving large files from a drive that has a page file on it, can slow the whole thing considerably. May be way off base, but maybe worth a look

[arthurking83]

Hey Jackaroo!(how are ya :th3:)

It was the two WD 250Gig drives..

with the switch to using AHCI on the motherboard, they kind'a packed it in and refused to work at their best(no idea why).

I looked at the data specs for the type of drive on WD's website and found that they have jumper pins on them, that do actually do something.
Switching the jumper from pin 1,2 to 5,6 was supposed to enable 150MB/s mode (otherwise.. what mode is it running in ??)

So I tried that as well, and basically just got stuck at 10-15MB/s transfer rates.

I got me two Samsung HD103SJ's today, and basically.. THEY FLY!

they easily sustain approximately 90MB/s transfer rates, and so far, copying the current year's 200Gig worth of photos at those kinds of rates... where the slowest rate I noted was 89.9 and generally up at about 91-92.

The time difference in transferring files is pretty startling.

I was used to seeing approximately 2+ hours to transfer that kind of data size, whereas Windows is currently estimating about 23mins for this lot, where the eSATA drive was the source.

Last night, I backed the same lot of files to the other faster WD 250G drive, and it took about 2hours, from the eSATA drive as the source.
I tried to use the slower WD 250Gig drive as the source initially, but Windows file transfer said .. 9 hours! :eek:

After a quick test with both the hard drive performance software and some quick file transferring, I also found that setting the cluster size from the default 4Kb to 64Kb, there is enough of a performance increase to justify it.
Considering that 99.9% of the files on these drives is going to be massively larger than 64Kb, I don't think the wasted disk space is going to be a concern.

ps. FWIW, system ram is 4Gb, and no page file has been touched.

Now when I'm using CaptureNX, with the NEF files sourced from the slower WD drives, it loaded/rendered the image verrrry slowly.. close to 20sec or more.(noting that CNX renders a 20Meg NEF as a 80-90Meg tiff file).
Using the faster WD 250Gig drive, the NEF's loaded in about 1sec.. maybe 1.5secs :p
Now from the new 103SJ drives, they definitely load in 1 second or less.

The only thing I've been having trouble getting my head around is why the two different WD 250G types are so different in performance :confused013

considering I tried the various jumper arrangements, formatted the drives(to be sure), rearranged them onto the SATA ports.. etc. the difference was about 4-5x faster (for the KLB0 drive over the HBB0 drive types).
The silly thing is tho, that before the change to where I enabled AHCI in the BIOS, the drives were more than fast enough, and everything ran fast.
The two drives were connected to SATA2 and 3 on the motherboard.
What killed the two drives was enabling AHCI, which was changed only for the two external SATA ports(5&6), as the 4 main ports were already set to AHCI!

[brindyman]

usb 2.0 The theoretical maximum data rate in USB 2.0 is 480 Mbit/s (60 MB/s) per controller and is shared amongst all attached devices.

usb 3.0 A new feature is the "SuperSpeed" bus, which provides a fourth transfer mode at 5.0 Gbit/s. The raw throughput is 4 Gbit/s, and the specification considers it reasonable to achieve 3.2 Gbit/s (0.4 Gbyte/s or 400 MByte/s), or more

SATA/e-sata Second generation SATA interfaces running at 3.0 Gbit/s are shipping in high volume as of 2010, and prevalent in all SATA disk drives and the majority of PC and server chipsets. With a native transfer rate of 3.0 Gbit/s, and taking 8b/10b encoding into account, the maximum uncoded transfer rate is 2.4 Gbit/s (300 MB/s)

so yes while e-sata is just ahead it is probably the most prefered but as more motherboards start to come out with usb 3.0 that will be the one to go for..........until

SATA 3:

3.0 standard (peak throughput about 600 MB/s (10b/8b coding plus 8 bit to one byte, without the protocol, or encoding overhead) was released on May 27, 2009. While even the fastest conventional hard disk drives can barely saturate the original SATA 1.5 Gbit/s bandwidth, Solid-State Drives have already saturated the SATA 3 Gbit/s limit at 285 MB/s net read speed and 250 MB/s net write speed with the Sandforce 1200 and 1500 controller.

but sata 3 will be a while off yet so no need to feel left behind :) :D