Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, morphine, Steel
Walkintarget wrote:Interesting find. I'm sorta surprised I hadn't heard of this before. What brand of eSATA cable are you using ?? I'm curious if the cable is out of spec.
Bauxite wrote:This is why I use drive bay docks that take bare drives, though not for daily swapping as it will wear the connectors out in less than a year. You have to go full caddy to do that,
Flatland_Spider wrote:I had a cellphone with a recessed USB connector and a cover for the connector. The stock USB cable worked fine, but other USB cables were hit or miss depending on the design on the end. There was on cable in particular that almost fit, and if I pushed on it, it would connect until I let it go.
Chrispy_ wrote:eSATA is dumb anyway because it doesn't pipe power in most implementations. That's why I hate it, at least
just brew it! wrote:I don't know whether this is a flaw in the eSATA connector spec, or clueless vendors implementing the spec incorrectly, but twice now I have encountered issues where an eSATA cable is physically incompatible with an eSATA device. The problem is that the molded plastic cover of the cable connector and the housing of the device physically interfere with each other, preventing the connector from being properly seated into the eSATA jack.
I've now had this happen with a Vantec drive dock, and a Rosewill front panel combo card reader / USB hub / eSATA port.
The solution in both cases was to use a pocket knife to shave down the outer plastic part of the cable connector until it fits.
Stupid simple crap like this pisses me off.
Captain Ned wrote:This is when Mr. Dremel comes in very handy.
JBI wrote:And then there's the issue of USB bridges not exposing the entire SATA command set. This was definitely an issue with USB2; I haven't used external USB3 drives enough (mostly only on the locked-down machines at work, so I'm not doing stuff like running HDD diagnostics anyhow) to know whether this is still the case.
Bauxite wrote:This is why I use drive bay docks that take bare drives, though not for daily swapping as it will wear the connectors out in less than a year. You have to go full caddy to do that,
While a caddy will eliminate wear on the drive connector, won't the connector on the backplane still wear out? Or are the backplane connectors rated for more insertions/removals than the drive connectors?
Captain Ned wrote:And SATA was supposed to be less twitchy than IDE.
meerkt wrote:A bigger problem I find with eSATA is that it didn't become mainstream. It's not something you'd find on an average laptop, nor on most motherboards (I suspect those plain SATA -> back bracket adapters aren't eSATA spec-wise).
just brew it! wrote:I don't know whether this is a flaw in the eSATA connector spec, or clueless vendors implementing the spec incorrectly, but twice now I have encountered issues where an eSATA cable is physically incompatible with an eSATA device. The problem is that the molded plastic cover of the cable connector and the housing of the device physically interfere with each other, preventing the connector from being properly seated into the eSATA jack.