External eSATA drives -- anybody using them.

@Dave;
Yeah, I have a Thermaltake BlacX enclosure now at work and at home. I use it on eSATA where i can and just use it over USB 2.0 where I cannot. The extra speed from eSATA on my laptop and home machine make it worth it to me.

Thanks for the link, might check one of those out for a machine at work.

pparks1 said:

@Dave;
Yeah, I have a Thermaltake BlacX enclosure now at work and at home. I use it on eSATA where i can and just use it over USB 2.0 where I cannot. The extra speed from eSATA on my laptop and home machine make it worth it to me.

Thanks for the link, might check one of those out for a machine at work.

Your welcome, the speed is nice.

GeneO said:

Dave76 said:

I know this was over a year ago but, in case someone else see's this.

If you have a free SATA port you can get a SATA to eSATA cable/back plate, for $3 to $6, that will plug into your SATA port and the plate will attach to the PCI backplate.

Then just use the eSATA cable to your eSATA external HDD.

It will be the same as connecting to your internal SATA port. It's fast, depending on your HDD, and you can run an OS from it, also hot swapable.
You may have to let it clear the cache before removing via 'Safely remove Hardware'.

You have to have the internal SATA in AHCI mode instead of IDE to get the hot-swap capability (or it won't even show up in safely remove).

Yes, you must have your BIOS set to AHCI or RAID to enable hot swapping.
RAID has all the benefits of AHCI and you don't have to have any drives in a RAID array.