PC Mechanic, New Article

Posted: 26 Jan 2011 03:30 AM PST

In the tail end of this article I briefly touched upon that if you want to use a big external hard drive, USB 3.0 or eSATA would be the best choice because both run circles around USB 2.0 and both technologies are affordable to anyone who wants them.

With either technology, both have their pros and cons, so I’ll cover a few of them.

Drivers

eSATA has more tenure than USB 3.0 does since it’s been standardized since 2004. As such, all modern computers recognize it, usually without the need for additional drivers.

The same cannot be said for USB 3.0 presently. For example, on the motherboard I have which is well under 6 months old, I did have to use the motherboard driver disc in Windows 7 just to get Windows to recognize the on-board USB 3.0 ports.

If going with USB 3.0 on a self-built PC, it’s more or less guaranteed at this point you will have to install drivers.

Versions

USB 3.0 has only one version, 3.0. USB has a longstanding history of sticking to a version number for the long haul; this is good because it involves a lot less guesswork on whether something you plug into it is compatible or not.

SATA can get real confusing real quick because nobody can seem to decide on what to call the revisions. However the three official revisions are SATA Revision 1 (1.5Gbit/s), SATA Revision 2 (3GBit/s) and SATA Revision 3 (6GB/s). "SATA I", "SATA II", "SATA III", "SATA 300" and otherwise at this point don’t count. That’s the industry saying that – not I.

The Big Question concerning the SATA revisions is does it matter concerning eSATA? Not really. It is highly unlikely you will notice any difference between SATA Revision 1, 2 or 3 when connected via eSATA cable. When directly connected to the motherboard, that’s a totally different story, but with over-the-wire eSATA, you’re not going to experience any significant improvement in transfer speeds between the revisions because of the wire limitations.

Full Supported vs. Mostly Supported

eSATA is fully supported across the board and there is no guesswork involved with it, thanks to its tenure in the market.

USB 3.0 is either going to be fully supported or ‘mostly’ depending on the hardware you have. For example, some motherboards are being delivered with USB 3.0 ports that do not have the capability of 3.0′s fastest transfer rate. It is faster than USB 2.0, but at the time of manufacture was not made to completely support 3.0′s top speed.

The fix for this is an easy one – use a card. If you notice your USB 3.0 isn’t transferring at what it’s supposed to be, a fully-supported card will cure that ill.

It’s important to note that this more or less only happens on motherboards and not card peripherals. As for why, I have no idea, but that’s the way it fared out.

By mid-2011 all motherboards should support USB 3.0′s fastest transfer speeds 100%.

Additional note: A motherboard with USB 3.0 ports that do not deliver the fastest transfer speeds doesn’t mean 3.0 won’t work. It will work, but just not at full capability.

Port placement

USB 3.0 acts just like 2.0 did. Ports are in the back or brought to the front via hub or 3.0-capable additional USB ports on your computer case. It can also be included in a card reader.

eSATA is installed and used either by card peripheral or all-in-one card reader. This may annoy some people because ports in the back are annoying to deal with. If you want one in the front, you have to install a large optical-drive-sized all-in-one card reader just to get it, which may be equally annoying – especially considering there’s never been a card reader made that doesn’t look like it came straight out of a 1979 Radio Shack Catalog (i.e. they’re ugly).

Transfer Speeds

This is the information people want to know more than anything else when it comes to USB 3.0 vs. eSATA.

Unfortunately there is no direct answer. I can’t say "eSATA transfers at X rate all the time", nor can I say that for USB 3.0. All I can give are ranges.

eSATA

This can be as slow as 35MB/s to as fast as 150MB/s. The range varies wildly because it depends what you’re connecting your eSATA drive to. If you connect your eSATA external drive via a laptop Cardbus or ExpressCard adapter, it will be on the slower side. On a regular desktop PC you’ll get much faster transfer rates.

USB 3.0

There really isn’t enough data out there concerning the practical data rate of USB 3.0. It has been speculated that with included protocol overhead factored in, it is possible to achieve 400MB/s. And yes that’s darned fast. 2TB can be transferred in less than 2 hours easily at that data rate. But then again it was speculated that USB 2.0 could achieve 60MB/s easily, and nobody achieves that (we get 40MB/s at best).

As a plain flat-out guess, I would say USB 3.0 will probably achieve 225 to 300MB/s on average. Maybe. Don’t take that as gospel.

It is well known that USB 3.0 will easily outrun eSATA in its current form, because SATA Revision 3′s speeds can only be achieved direct-from-motherboard. If going external on-the-wire with eSATA, you’re not going to get over 150MB/s even if all your stuff is SATA Revision 3 equipped.

USB 3.0 is the better of the two

I don’t pick USB 3.0 for speed but rather for convenience. It’s backward compatible to USB 2.0 and every modern computer has USB ports, so you’re never stuck without a port to plug into. eSATA can only go where there’s a port, and that means you’ll have to buy a card peripheral for every computer you want to connect it to.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

USB 3.0 vs. eSATA

How To Enhance Privacy Without Do-Not-Track

Posted: 26 Jan 2011 03:00 AM PST

I personally believe the upcoming do-not-track list (similar to do-not-call) is going to be a complete bust because it wholly depends upon whether web companies actually honor it or not. Larger ones will, smaller ones won’t and that’s just the way it will work.

The key to understanding do-not-track relies 100% on your cookie data. Yes, I’m going to tell you "clear your cookies and cache"; the same thing you’ve heard a million times before.

There are however a few other ways you can browse without having to remember to clear that data.

Private Browsing

The one (and only one) good thing about private browsing is that once the browser is closed, all session data is cleared. If you’re worried about Google or Facebook or whatever-site "following" you around via means of cookies, private browsing is by far the easiest way to get around that.

You can launch a private browsing session through means of the mouse, but it’s better if you just remember the keystroke.

When the browser is open:

Firefox: CTRL+SHIFT+P
Internet Explorer 8: CTRL+SHIFT+P
Chrome: CTRL+SHIFT+N

Auto-dump cookies on exit

If using private-session browsing is too much of an annoyance, you can simply instruct the browser to dump session data on exit instead. This is almost exactly like private browsing.

Firefox

1. Tools / Options / Privacy
2. Choose "I close Firefox" from the drop-down menu

All cookies will be dumped on close of the browser.

Google Chrome

1. Menu / Options / "Under the Hood" / Content Settings
2. Check box to clear cookies when the browser is closed.

(Note: What you see above is a Chromium nightly build, which is what I use. Google Chrome looks slightly different but the setting is the same.)

Internet Explorer 8

Unfortunately as far as I know, you can’t have IE auto-dump session data on exit, so you’ll have to use Private Browsing, called InPrivate by IE.

You may get the idea of going to Internet Options / Privacy / Advanced and "overriding" settings here:

DO NOT change this stuff. If you do, it will annoy you to no end. If you change either to ‘Block’, some web sites that require logins won’t work. If you change to ‘Prompt", you’ll get this pop-up dialog over and over again for every site that uses cookies.

Leave IE handle cookies the way it sees fit, otherwise use InPrivate browsing instead. When you open up a new InPrivate browser via CTRL+SHIFT+P, it can be run side-by-side with a non-private browser, so it’s fairly easy to deal with.

Do-not-track is all about cookies? That’s it?

In a nutshell, yes. Cookie data is what can ‘carry’ from site to site. Clear it, and the only other way you’re ‘tracked’ is by IP address – and that’s fine because it doesn’t hold any personal data.

Yes, once again the old ‘clear your cookies’ advice is still valid even today. Some things never change.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

How To Enhance Privacy Without Do-Not-Track

you and you

Rabu, 26 Januari 2011