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D-Dock PCI eSata worth it?

post #1 of 5
12/29/08 at 5:26pm
Thread Starter 
I've decided to put off replacing my 7 year old P4 desktop for one more year and just use my D820 since I have a D-Dock for it already. I've been toying with the idea of putting a PCI eSata card in the dock and use an eSata drive when it's docked. I have a 320GB 5400RPM drive internal. Is it worth it to go with an eSata setup too or will there not be much speed improvement?

Thanks
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post #2 of 5
12/30/08 at 10:05am
You're better off getting an Expresscard eSATA card than to put a PCI card in the DDock. The PCI slot for the DDock is connected via USB anyway so you won't see a speed improvement there. However, the Expresscard will/can connect via PCI Express giving you full eSATA throughput. Watch out though, some Expresscards use the Expresscard's USB connection rather than it's PCIe one.
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post #3 of 5
12/30/08 at 6:51pm
Thread Starter 
Great info, thanks.

How do you know which connection it uses? Any of these be worth it?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...&Order=REVIEWS

And how about performance? Would it really be that noticeable over the internal drive? I don't do very much intensive computing. I'm debating between the hard drive option or a 24" LCD
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post #4 of 5
12/31/08 at 3:15am
You're not going to get a huge boost over the performance of the internal drive. The internal drive is running SATA 1.5 anyway. (Mechanical hard disks can't even saturate the Sata 1.5 bus let alone SATA 3.0
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post #5 of 5
1/1/09 at 1:36pm
For what you have described, eSATA is a waste of time and money for you. As mentioned by MrEvil, it will not be faster than your internal hard drive. And if you are just putting media/files on this external drive (e.g. not installing and running applications off of the drive), then you will won't notice any difference over straight USB2.0.

If you want the best value for your money in terms of usage experience, get yourself the nice 24" monitor that you wanted. If you want to improve your hard drive performance, then you'd be better off trying to find a 7200rpm mechanical hard drive, or a fast solid state drive.
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