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LaCie's eSATA Thunderbolt Hub pushes data transfer to the max
The move from traditional I/O options toward Thunderbolt across the Mac line (with the notable exception of the Mac Pro) has meant some headscratching moments for users of high-end storage. Buying all-new Thunderbolt-ready RAIDs isn't an option for those on a budget, especially when there may be big investments already in eSATA-connected equipment. As more Thunderbolt peripherals and accessories have made it to market, this conundrum is beginning to clear. LaCie's eSATA hub Thunderbolt Series, at $199, delivers eSATA performance and convenience for high-end video and graphics users at a price that's not out of balance. Design The eSATA hub is clearly a product of LaCie's industrial design DNA, strongly resembling the company's Little Big Disk SSD unit. The aluminum ridged case provides maximum surface area for heat dissipation, and the removable base is heavy enough to help keep the hub upright when it's plugged into multiple cables. The hub can also be deployed without the base and laid flat. The hub has two Thunderbolt ports for passthrough support, plus two eSATA ports. Power and a Kensington-style security port round out the back panel. The unit gets warm in normal operation, but not painfully so -- just don't use it on your lap. It ships without a Thunderbolt cable, so you'll need one of Apple's or the Elgato short jumper cable. Performance Expectations for eSATA always come down to speed, and with the bandwidth of Thunderbolt behind it the LaCie hub delivers. I tested the hub on a MacBook Pro with a G-RAID dual drive external RAID 0 unit, first using Firewire 800 as a baseline; I measured about 40-60 MB/s transfer speeds with Blackmagic's Disk Speed Test utility. Reconnecting the drive to the eSATA hub transformed it from a middling performer to a speed demon. I saw transfer rates in excess of 200 MB/s both for writes and reads. Obviously the speed of your storage device will be a limiting factor in the performance you get from the eSATA hub, but I didn't see anything to belie LaCie's assertion that the hub is delivering full eSATA speed. In fact, compared to the ExpressCard solutions of the past, you're gaining back some of the missing eSATA bandwidth (3 Gbps) that overshot the card slot's specification (2.5 Gbps). The passthrough Thunderbolt port also worked as advertised, allowing me to drive a Cinema Display or connect an Ethernet adapter off the back of the unit. Display performance seemed unaffected as I copied multi-gigabyte files to and fro via the hub. Wrap-up At $199, the eSATA Thunderbolt hub might be a little expensive for the casual user. For anyone who has a stack of eSATA drives in constant use, however, it's a bargain. Adding this unit to your interface arsenal will upgrade your connectivity choices and enable you to consider modern Mac models without sacrificing your legacy drives. [As commenters have noted, the LaCie hub does not support port multiplexing, which would allow attaching multiple drives on each of the eSATA ports; the Sonnet product combo of the Thunderbolt-ExpressCard adapter & a Tempo eSATA card would do that, but would not allow Thunderbolt pass-through.] Pros Fast and trouble-free Solidly designed Passthrough Thunderbolt port Cons Priced for prosumers Who is it for? eSATA storage users with a Thunderbolt Mac in mind.
Intel Sandy Bridge chipset flaw identified as a rogue transistor affecting SATA ports
Intel raised quite a few eyebrows yesterday by disclosing that its Cougar Point chipsets suffer from an incurable design issue that would potentially degrade Serial ATA transfers over time. AnandTech has gone to the trouble of getting in touch with Intel to seek more information and the problem, as it turns out, is a single transistor that's prone to a higher current leakage than tolerable. This can not only diminish performance over the 3Gbps SATA ports, it can actually make them fail altogether. There is more comforting news, however, in that the pair of 6Gbps SATA ports on the chipset are untroubled by this ailment, so devices and users that never plug into the 3Gbps connections can just carry on as if nothing's ever happened. For everyone else, a repair and replacement service is taking place now, with Intel's budget for dealing with this problem said to be a generous $700 million.
Toshiba announces 750GB and 1TB laptop HDDs, gives them awkward model names like MK7559GSXP
Time for us to welcome the world's most capacious 9.5mm-tall hard drive, the 750GB MK7559GSXP. Yeah, it's quite a mouthful, but then it's not every day that you come across a storage disk that packs data quite so tightly, so maybe this is a name worth remembering. Not only is Toshiba's new two-platter 5,400RPM beastie the first ever to rise above 640GB without expanding to the chunkier 12.5mm height profile, it's also claimed to be 14 percent more energy efficient than the Japanese company's previous biggest model. If you don't mind moving up to the 12.5mm class, Toshiba's also bringing out a new MKxx59GSM series, which can stretch all the way up to 1TB, thanks to fitting three platters into the 2.5-inch diagonal space. Samples of both will be distributed to system manufacturers by the end of April, with mass production following soon thereafter.
Faster SATA standard coming in second quarter of this year, says SATA-IO
The folks behind the Serial ATA standard have been working on drafting a new, faster spec for a little while now, but it looks like things are finally starting to firm up, and SATA-IO marketing chair Conrad Maxwell now says that the new 6Gb/s standard is on track for release in the second quarter of this year. That, as you're no doubt aware, is twice as fast as the current spec and, according to Maxwell, it'll be backwards compatible with both the SATA-1.5Gb/s and SATA-3Gb/s specs. What's more, it's apparently also the group's intention to double the E-SATA spec to 6Gb/s as well, although no one seems to be making any promises on a date for that just yet. As a bit of a bonus, the group will apparently also be rolling out a new Power over ESATA spec (or ESATAp), which will allow 5 or 12 volts of power to be delivered via an ESATA connector.
