eSATA was commonly used since 2007. Back then it made sense, because USB 2.0 was too slow and Firewire 800 was too finicky and well - still slower.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-03-23, 00:27:

eSATA was commonly used since 2007. Back then it made sense, because USB 2.0 was too slow and Firewire 800 was too finicky and well - still slower.

Commonly used and being useful are two different things at best esSata was a stop gap measure till USB3 arrived and was then promptly forgotten about by the industry.

My brother had eSATA on a new Gigabyte board back around 2009-10. He used it with 2 external hard drives, but the port was unreliable so he switched back to USB.

shamino wrote on 2024-03-23, 04:57:

My brother had eSATA on a new Gigabyte board back around 2009-10. He used it with 2 external hard drives, but the port was unreliable so he switched back to USB.

I use a an M.2 form factor JMB585 chipset based SATA port, passively adapted to E-SATA, to connect to a 4-bay E-SATA enclosure (with a SATA port multiplier) in my NAS setup.

This has proven very reliable for me. E-SATA can be very reliable indeed.

The mention of esata for this application, was chosen for its synthesis of these features:

1) low barrier to entry on the construction of the enclosure. Just a COTS industrial PSU, and dumb cables, in a 3D printed box.
2) Inexpensive interface cards or SATA port adapters for use with ESATA cabling are readily available, and can easily go in modern systems. (Even very modern intel Z790 based SATA controllers support using ESATA cables on such adapters in this fashion. It being "A thing" is accurate, even if very few people actually make use of the capability. It is *STILL* present. What is *NOT* supported, is port replication. Again, the major outstanding issue with ESATA, was that there were competing standards for port replication , and most sata controller makers did not pick a horse in that game, and instead just said "NO PORT REPLICATION." (which is what is the case with the cited intel Z790 chipset SATA controller. NO Port Replication! Period!) As long as you run 1 cable, to 1 drive, that ESATA dumb external cable will work just fine. If you note about the listed, dedicated ESATA card, however, it DOES support port replication (FIS mode), meaning you could use a SINGLE cable, and stuff a port replicating backplane inside your enclosure for a simple 5 bay enclosure, like this guy. Just be aware that it WILL NEVER WORK on a sata controller that does not support Port Replication, which is basically any internal baked-on SATA controller. You'd need the adapter card for it.)
3) Vintage optical drives WILL NOT saturate SATA-2. (A 16x DVD has a theoretical maximum sustained thruput of ~21mbyte a second, which is below even ATA-133 speeds. SATA-II tops out at 300mbyte/sec. That's quite a bit of room.)
4) ESATA is agnostic of whatever the hell you put on that SATA->IDE bridge, meaning you can put that LS120/Jazz/Tape/Zip/Whatever drive in there just fine.

If you want to jam a whole lot of modern spinny disks inside to make a NAS, you are better off with an industrial chasis.

USB3 is "No interface purchase necessary!", and "Is MUCH faster than ESATA!", but suffers from "Needs a very intelligent, and thus very pricy controller card inside the enclosure itself, and with a much lower potential for putting any old drive in there, and it working as expected."

Please stop being hung up on this.

shamino wrote on 2024-03-23, 04:57:

My brother had eSATA on a new Gigabyte board back around 2009-10. He used it with 2 external hard drives, but the port was unreliable so he switched back to USB.

That was always my experience. For home backups I've gone from floppies to CD (this was very brief since I have too much data) to internal hard drives to external USB hard drives to external USB firewire hard drives to external esata (quickly went back to USB) and then finally to NAS which was roughly 12 yrs ago and been that method ever since. Rotation of three offsite NAS and one on site a month and no worries. Currently switching from robocopy on three of them to zfs replication replicated from my server that also snapshots my datasets. This is the way.

I run(for how many years of using it) a win98 machine with no cd drive or bulky hdd. Just no need, for a 98ish era machine. Havent missed it once.

All installs through usb, every game so far with cd music works with a virtual drive or local files.

For a modern machine, just no reason, better to make the case smaller than have reserved space for nothing useful.

Some software has unusal protection, that you either have to violate dmca to use that way (dungeon master, original disk version, for example. It used a disk mastering technique that produced 'ambiguous' sectors that could be read differently by the controller on subsequent reads, and kept track of this. This is a physical thing about the disks that was not readily duplicatable, and relied on mfm encoding correction shenanigans), or that make use of nonstandard media in some way, that disk images dont work well with.

Additionally, there may be special application uses to keep old media, (KORG synthesizers, or knitting machines and floppy diskettes, for example.)

Having an old tape backup library handed to you through the dreaded 'friends and family' network, might make you suddenly have a need to hook up a vintage tape drive for forensic recovery purposes, etc.

More realistically/commonly, I'd consider a CF->IDE front loading adapter, for ready use with a vintage rebuild, as a valid use case.

Things where you only need 1 or 2 drive bays that you otherwise dont have (due to the gamerbox plague), that a DIY esata cabled enclosure would give you on your workbench.

The last cases I bought were two NOS LianLi Lancool K59 for 30€ each, two because my wife wanted another one when she saw mine. 😀 These cases are quite heavy and resistant with 0.9mm-1mm sheet metal, quite comfortable for assembly with many thumb screws. Aesthetically, I can't say that I like them very much, but it is the first time that I have computers that heat up less with the case closed, it is very curious.
Maybe having two 140mm fans on the front, I changed these for some Artic P14, and another two 140mm ones on the top is the reason, something that at the time must have been unusual, after all they must have been released around 2011.
They had an eSATA port, a USB 3.0 and a USB 2.0, something normal back then, I changed the eSATA for another USB 3.0.
The hard drive bays are modular and can be completely removed, so any graphics card can be mounted, since without a 3.5 hard drive bay the total space is around 415mm, but there's still space for three 3.5 HDDs and two 2.5 HDDs or SSDs. I have an ASUS TUF 6700XT, and it has plenty of space all over.
And they have three 5.25 drive bays and a 120mm fan on the back, where I have the radiator from an Asetek 550LC AIO that I bought in 2012 and an Asetek 550LC fourth gen in my wife's computer.
I think that a modern, powerful computer can be perfectly mounted in these cases.
And maybe the most important thing; I can't use modern RGB lighting systems because I have epilepsy, and they are bad for my health, so there is nothing worse from my point of view, so many useless colored lights; and I have too many CDs and DVDs, so I need an optical drive in my computers, so I don't have any modern cases, they are the worst cases in the history of compatible PCs, but it seems that there is nothing else if you want a quality case, they are here to stay. 🙁
One review from 2011.
(https://silentpcreview.com/lancool-pc-k59-midtower-case/)

wierd_w wrote on 2024-03-23, 07:14:

The mention of esata for this application, was chosen for its synthesis of these features: […]
Show full quote

The mention of esata for this application, was chosen for its synthesis of these features:

1) low barrier to entry on the construction of the enclosure. Just a COTS industrial PSU, and dumb cables, in a 3D printed box.
2) Inexpensive interface cards or SATA port adapters for use with ESATA cabling are readily available, and can easily go in modern systems. (Even very modern intel Z790 based SATA controllers support using ESATA cables on such adapters in this fashion. It being "A thing" is accurate, even if very few people actually make use of the capability. It is *STILL* present. What is *NOT* supported, is port replication. Again, the major outstanding issue with ESATA, was that there were competing standards for port replication , and most sata controller makers did not pick a horse in that game, and instead just said "NO PORT REPLICATION." (which is what is the case with the cited intel Z790 chipset SATA controller. NO Port Replication! Period!) As long as you run 1 cable, to 1 drive, that ESATA dumb external cable will work just fine. If you note about the listed, dedicated ESATA card, however, it DOES support port replication (FIS mode), meaning you could use a SINGLE cable, and stuff a port replicating backplane inside your enclosure for a simple 5 bay enclosure, like this guy. Just be aware that it WILL NEVER WORK on a sata controller that does not support Port Replication, which is basically any internal baked-on SATA controller. You'd need the adapter card for it.)
3) Vintage optical drives WILL NOT saturate SATA-2. (A 16x DVD has a theoretical maximum sustained thruput of ~21mbyte a second, which is below even ATA-133 speeds. SATA-II tops out at 300mbyte/sec. That's quite a bit of room.)
4) ESATA is agnostic of whatever the hell you put on that SATA->IDE bridge, meaning you can put that LS120/Jazz/Tape/Zip/Whatever drive in there just fine.

If you want to jam a whole lot of modern spinny disks inside to make a NAS, you are better off with an industrial chasis.

USB3 is "No interface purchase necessary!", and "Is MUCH faster than ESATA!", but suffers from "Needs a very intelligent, and thus very pricy controller card inside the enclosure itself, and with a much lower potential for putting any old drive in there, and it working as expected."

Please stop being hung up on this.

I could be wrong, but I believe that I read somewhere that the SATA controller in the B450 (and likely other AMD chiosets) supports port multipliers and FIS. TBH, I have never tried it.

EDIT: I stand corrected. The on-CPU (Ryzen 5 4600G) SATA controller supports port multipliers (PMP) and FIS (FBS) [1] , as does the JMB585 SATA controller, but the chipset integrated SATA controller supports port multipliers (PMP), but NOT FIS (FBS).

[1]
root@omv:~# dmesg -T | egrep -i ahci.*flags
[Wed Mar 13 00:20:31 2024] ahci 0000:02:00.1: flags: 64bit ncq sntf stag pm led clo only pmp pio slum part sxs deso sadm sds apst
[Wed Mar 13 00:20:31 2024] ahci 0000:0c:00.0: flags: 64bit ncq sntf stag pm led clo pmp fbs pio slum part ccc apst boh
[Wed Mar 13 00:20:31 2024] ahci 0000:0f:00.0: flags: 64bit ncq sntf ilck pm led clo only pmp fbs pio slum part
[Wed Mar 13 00:20:31 2024] ahci 0000:0f:00.1: flags: 64bit ncq sntf ilck pm led clo only pmp fbs pio slum part

root@omv:~# IFS=$'\n'; for i in $(dmesg -T | egrep -i ahci.*flags); do echo $i ; addr=$(echo $i | awk '{print $7}' |awk -F":" '{print $2":"$3}'); lspci | egrep $addr ;done
[Wed Mar 13 00:20:31 2024] ahci 0000:02:00.1: flags: 64bit ncq sntf stag pm led clo only pmp pio slum part sxs deso sadm sds apst
02:00.1 SATA controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] 400 Series Chipset SATA Controller (rev 01)
[Wed Mar 13 00:20:31 2024] ahci 0000:0c:00.0: flags: 64bit ncq sntf stag pm led clo pmp fbs pio slum part ccc apst boh
0c:00.0 SATA controller: JMicron Technology Corp. JMB58x AHCI SATA controller
[Wed Mar 13 00:20:31 2024] ahci 0000:0f:00.0: flags: 64bit ncq sntf ilck pm led clo only pmp fbs pio slum part
0f:00.0 SATA controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 81)
[Wed Mar 13 00:20:31 2024] ahci 0000:0f:00.1: flags: 64bit ncq sntf ilck pm led clo only pmp fbs pio slum part
0f:00.1 SATA controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 81)

wierd_w wrote on 2024-03-22, 04:53:

See for instance, this pizzabox.

https://www.amazon.com/Silverstone-Micro-ATX- … s%2C106&sr=8-19

Just recently used this exact case for a build. Had one of the original back in the day too. Only thing changed is the swap of USB 2.0 for 3.0 ports in front. Still the sam decently heavy steel chassis.

Inwin makes some nice "vintage" style cases still as well. Just gotta search for'm since they're more business oriented now days.