A-DATA shows off badly-designed eSATA flash drive

We're not exactly sure what's up with the design here, but apparently, A-DATA felt it was a great idea to unveil an uber-speedy eSATA SSD flash drive that requires both an eSATA and a USB connection. Supposedly, this 16GB to 32GB unit can't actually be plugged directly into an eSATA port as-is, as power from the USB socket is necessary for things to function properly. Essentially, the flash drive has to be connected to the pictured dongle -- which obviously takes up two ports in your machine -- in order to operate. Needless to say, we've all ideas that we'll see a design tweak before these ship en masse.

[Tom @ Jan 8th 2008 2:22AM]

Don't blame the device, blame the interface. eSATA is a SATA data connection only and carries no power at all. So a USB port or a wall wart would be required to power it. I have a 2.5 inch hard drive enclosure with USB and eSATA, and when using eSATA for data, you also have to use a USB plug to power it via a DC port the device has.

[feffrey @ Jan 8th 2008 5:13AM]

I have one too and have had endless problems with it. When I transfer data there is a 50% chance that it will transfer at usb speed not at the e-sata speed. The problem is with the enclosure, so I am guessing that most are not like that.

[packetsniffer @ Jan 8th 2008 8:23AM]

How am I not surprised Engadget didn't know this? Hehe

[Arthur Nonamiss @ Jan 8th 2008 2:44AM]

Can't design your way around the laws of physics. Devices need power, and eSATA doesn't provide it. It's either USB, or a wall-wart. Or figure a way to make it run on your sense of self-worth. Or magnets.

[Daniel Smith @ Jan 8th 2008 2:49AM]

yeah this is actually a good work around instead of needing to plug it into the wall, I like this idea better.

[Rogerc @ Jan 8th 2008 3:10AM]

Unless you are out of usb ports, I rather use this approach than having to plug another power supply to the wall

[Reader @ Jan 8th 2008 2:47AM]

Too bad standard PSUs don't have an external 12v outlet for power-hungry peripherals.

[Tom @ Jan 8th 2008 2:52AM]

Thats one thing I always liked about Mac laptops a while back. They have full 6 pin powered firewire, and it was more then enough to power a hard drive. Where as USB enclosures have 2 USB plugs, because if a port only offers the normal spec for power, it's usually not enough to spin a drive up.

[nak @ Jan 8th 2008 3:13AM]

I suppose the human body is also a bad design, what with it needing food AND water.

[Brendan @ Jan 15th 2008 11:04AM]

Yeah, but we don't run on a 12V current.

[EQC @ Jan 8th 2008 3:44AM]

They ought to just put a solar panel on it like old calculators used to have. Flash and data transfer can't be too power hungry can it?

[Arthur Nonamiss @ Jan 8th 2008 6:00PM]

I don't believe you'd be able to get enough power from a (reasonably sized) solar panel. Even if you could, hard drives don't react well to a loss of power. If you lost power at just the right (wrong) time during a write operation, you could easily lose the whole drive.

Now, if someone could just invent a Mr. Fusion...

[Brian @ Jan 8th 2008 3:47AM]

What's the point? USB flash drives are useful because they're small, convenient, and compatible with just about any system. If you have to plug it into eSATA, which isn't on most computers one runs into, not to mention that the cable is almost as thick as the device itself, you lose that convenience. If it's going to require all that, and you really need fast, solid state storage, you might as well just get a solid-state SATA disk and put it in a 2.5" eSATA enclosure.

[batfastad @ Jan 8th 2008 4:48AM]

@ Brian

These are the pros of SSDs that I can think of:
- More resilient than conventional HDDs
- Draw less power than conventional HDDs
- Faster read/write access

So surely it's ideal to have an external USB/e-SATA solid state drive!
That is the point!

[batfastad @ Jan 8th 2008 4:51AM]

And give it a few years there'll be fewer firewire ports and all laptops will have an e-SATA port.
I think you can already get Express Card e-SATA cards to plug into laptops that have Express Card slots (mine does and it's 2 years old now)

You'd lose the benefits of fast read/write because the card's probably acting as some sort of PCI/UDB bridge into the laptop... but at least you can plug them in and access your important stuff!

[Hugo Ruivinho @ Jan 8th 2008 2:21PM]

Personally the esata design is bad and i think it wont live for long. Reason: no powerpins on plug Result: get power from external source

It maybe be replaced in the future due to this, by either the new usb 3.0 or new firewire standards coming this year.
Or maybe they'll update it to be to a new thing, maybe PSATA (powered esata)

[Richard @ Jan 8th 2008 10:14AM]

We are already seeing esata feature on the addin front panels for computers. I have no idea if the cable they have is adapting itself to another standard of powered esata or not, and if not hten there urgantly needs to be a new standard made so that we dont end up with dozerns of incompatible connectors.

In any case, I think we will see front and back panels for desktop PCs with the needed power for these soon enough, and hopefully something for the mobile crowd too.