FTII People

One of the key advantages that eSATA offers over USB and FireWire is speed. While the other two have overhead from converting the signal between the external interface and the internal IDE based drives, SATA does not have this problem. Because SATA is the standard interface used on many new hard drives, a simple converter between the internal and external connectors is required in the housing. This means that the external device should run at the same speed as an Internal SATA drive.

USB 1.1 – 15 Mbps
FireWire (1394a) – 400 Mbps
USB 2.0 – 480 Mbps
FireWire 800 (1394b) – 800 Mpbs
SATA 1.5 – 1.5 Gbps
SATA 3.0 – 3.0 Gbps