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eSATA port on the way?
Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 11:29 am
by brimur
Hi, I was searching the web for an ultra low powered pc and this one looks great but it is missing the one thing that I was looking for (apart from the low power
) and that is an eSATA port. Is there a possibility that this will be in the next revision or down the line somewhere? Thanks and great product you have here!
Re: eSATA port on the way?
Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 1:06 pm
by irads
We find eSATA to be not quite as useful as USB2.
A major issue is that unlike USB2 eSATA does not incorporate power supply.
Re: eSATA port on the way?
Posted: Sun Mar 29, 2009 6:56 pm
by mini
Well, if you use the internal SATA port with a SATA-eSATA cable you CAN connect to external devices (with independent power supply).
Re: eSATA port on the way?
Posted: Fri Apr 03, 2009 2:49 pm
by MattW
I have to agree with Brimur here.
Having an eSATA port would be a tremendous win. Yes, USB2 is powered, but is basically limited to ~35MB/sec max. This is a serious limit to virtually all modern drives.
eSATA (depending on version) has a max of 150 or 300MB/sec making it easy to attach an external SATA drive and get data from it at the full speed of the drive.
I realize the difficulties of doing this is partly because the Poulsbo chipset supports PATA only (and you're doing that PATA-to-SATA conversion already for the internal drive.)
What about an option to fill the mini-PCIe slot with a SATA controller instead of a WiFi card? It would make the Fit-PC2 an ideal network file server because it could have a large external drive array attached via a high-speed link (eSATA) and the Gigabit ethernet port.
That would be awesome!
Re: eSATA port on the way?
Posted: Tue May 12, 2009 9:55 am
by brimur
MattW wrote:I have to agree with Brimur here.
Having an eSATA port would be a tremendous win. Yes, USB2 is powered, but is basically limited to ~35MB/sec max. This is a serious limit to virtually all modern drives.
eSATA (depending on version) has a max of 150 or 300MB/sec making it easy to attach an external SATA drive and get data from it at the full speed of the drive.
I realize the difficulties of doing this is partly because the Poulsbo chipset supports PATA only (and you're doing that PATA-to-SATA conversion already for the internal drive.)
What about an option to fill the mini-PCIe slot with a SATA controller instead of a WiFi card? It would make the Fit-PC2 an ideal network file server because it could have a large external drive array attached via a high-speed link (eSATA) and the Gigabit ethernet port.
That would be awesome!
My thoughts exactly. As a Media Server its perfect except for the limited storage. Most media servers these days are in the TB's I have a mini pc at the mo connected via esata to a 2TB external drive. Im sure that size is becoming the norm now and the USB2 speed limitation is a hinderence for me anyway!
Re: eSATA port on the way?
Posted: Mon Jun 08, 2009 6:43 am
by martinnorby
The Fit-PC2 is the perfect solution to my year-long search for a low-power server. But I want a RAID 1 disc configuration, and as far as I can see, this is only possible with an eSata port.