The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) has announced that it is working on a new specification that will provide power to external SATA (eSATA) devices without the need for a separate power connection. Called “Power Over eSATA initiative”, the specification is expected to be completed sometime in the second half of this year.

Devices taking advantage of the new spec no longer will require a separate power cable but will draw power for a single drive directly from the host system using the Power Over eSATA cable. The SATA-IO said that the new cable will remain compatible with the existing eSATA connector and support the current maximum interface transfer rate of 3Gb/s.

Power Over eSATA products are expected to be available on the market as soon as the second half of 2008.

sure

Jan 14, 2008 19:24     

but will this draw a lot of power from the motherboard? if so, how much? and will it affect true performance, sure they say it will still run at 3Gb/s but what will the REAL speeds be?
mazuki report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Re: mazuki

Jan 15, 2008 20:57     

The bottleneck is the HD speed, NOT the interface speed... and that will not change until you get HDs writing and reading at almost 400Mb/s... which will not happen anytime soon so stop worrying. Just to put it into perspective: 1 - current HD speeds are not even at the 100Mb/s yet; 2 - those speeds don't seem to go up that much for a long long time... 3 - maybe SSDs will, in the future, change that... but in the future doesn't mean this year, or next year... or even the one after that... and then it would need to be a acceptable prices... Just stop worrying :)

Q report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Except that....

Jan 16, 2008 13:19     

If someone wants to chain several sATA Drives together - will the connection retain power for all drives?
billy bob report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

works for existing devices too?

Jan 16, 2008 22:17     

this means that I can dump the power cable of my existing external hdd and use the new power over eSATA cable to power my external hdd?
Dennis report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

All it is is this...

Jan 17, 2008 21:36     

a simple capacitor structure on the chip board of the external caddy. easy.
R report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Sooo.....

Jan 18, 2008 01:24     

.....it sound a bit familier--- USB perhaps?
howie report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

@Q

Feb 15, 2008 12:21     

It's a 100MB/s not 100Mb/s - big difference.
S report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0