Period fibre-optic broadband

[Penners]

I must be getting old as I've not yet heard of USB4

It was mentioned earlier in this thread, so I assumed that it was newest version of USB that had snuck in while I wasn't looking (which I rarely am).

I have to say that data transmission speed isn't my biggest problem, when it comes to communication between my laptop and my two external HDDs - it's the drives' "cranking up" time which is often the most significant factor. I don't imagine that eSATA resolves that problem.

I presume that delay is completely eliminated if you use SSDs, although these are, of course, considerably more limited in their capacity and a lot more expensive.

Can eSATA provide power to the external device, in the way that USB can?

 

[Flyfisher]

The external drive "cranking up" is a power management thing and can probably be turned off so that the external drive is spinning all the time. It's not an inherent hard drive characteristic, otherwise PCs would run very slowly indeed.

SSDs require no time to 'spin up' as they have no moving parts, but as you rightly say, they are currently best suited for internal system drive applications. No doubt that will change though.

Powering an external hard drive through USB depends, I think, on the drive size. 2.5 inch drives (as generally used in laptops) can be powered via USB but 3.5 inch drives (as generally used in desktop PCs) cannot - at least I've not seen any. But 2.5 inch drives can be slower than 3.5 inch ones, so it's the usual swings and roundabouts game.

I would guess it's the same with eSATA drives, but I'm not sure about that. This article suggests that the eSATA interface does not provide power but that a USB port can be used to provide power. So an external housing with two cables (or a hybrid one) that connect to the eSata and USB ports - USB for power and eSATA for data. Whether the speed increase is a worthwhile tradeoff for this extra cable, I've no idea.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2358135,00.asp

 

[Penners]

Whether the speed increase is a worthwhile tradeoff for this extra cable, I've no idea.

I confess that I have no thoughts of using an eSATA drive for the time being - if only because my laptop has no appropriate port. But I'm always grateful to be able to pick knowledgeable brains, in order to add to my pitifully small pool of IT knowledge.

Update: The Openreach engineer has just been and set up our Infinity connection, so this post will probably reach you before I've thought of it. Displaying enormously original humour, we referred to him as Buzz Lightyear - a bijou jokette that went miles over his head.

 

[Flyfisher]

Ah, laptops - I never think of them as I'm not really a fan. I've no idea if even the latest laptops would have eSATA ports and I suspect it's more of a desktop PC thing.

Good news about the Infinity installation; have you noticed a substantial improvement? Things like receiving tomorrow's news for example :wink: Actually, if that is the case, perhaps you could PM me tomorrows stock market prices? :lol:

Shame about the BT chap's sense of humour failure. Perhaps they've struggled so much to roll out Infinity that they don't have the time to consider the beyond.

 

[Penners]

I think what may have rankled with him was the fact that he was installing Infinity for me, in the middle of nowhere, but he has no prospect of getting it where he lives, in a community of 3000 people!

 

[Keithj]

Apparently BT will launch FTTC here on March 31. No sign of it being offered to customers, though. I'm still hoping.

eSATA: I bought a new PC with an eSATA port on the side a couple of years ago. I plugged in a brand new 1TB eSATA external drive. It didn't work. After much to-and-fro, I bought a card to go in one of the free slots inside, to provide 4 more internal SATA connections (why I'd need 8 I dunno, but hey!) and an external eSATA. The internal ones worked fine. The external one still didn't work. I tried a different eSATA drive. Didn't work - neither in the port on the side nor in the port on the card. My conclusion: eSATA is a myth. The cables are nice, though, with little latches to hold them in place.

SSD: my PC took at least 5 minutes to boot up. A friend suggested an SSD. At first, it wouldn't work at all: the SSD was so fast waking up when the power came on that it had given up yelling at the PC and gone back to sleep before the PC came alive. (Diagnosing that was fun!) I built a little delay box that turns on the power to the SSD a second after the mains goes on, and it all accled as it should. Migrating stuff over was a real pain - I wouldn't do that again!
Boot-up now takes under half a minute and stuff runs a lot faster. The catch is that SSDs have a limited "lifetime" in terms of number of reads/writes, so I didn't want background (and especially Apple) stuff forever churning it: I had to learn the technique for fooling them that their stuff is on drive C (SSD) when it's really on the old hard drive. Yes, SSDs are brilliant!

The above post is also available in kiSwahili for those who need it.

 

[Penners]

Apparently BT will launch FTTC here on March 31. No sign of it being offered to customers, though. I'm still hoping.

From the point where the Openreach website reported that our exchange was "Accepting Orders" for fibre broadband, to the point where the BT website would actually offer Infinity to me was around 3 months. So by that yardstick you should be able to get it around the end of June.

You probably know this, but if you enter your postcode on the web page below, it will tell you the status of fibre to your exchange - "Coming Soon" or "Accepting Orders".

http://www.superfast-openreach.co.uk/where-and-when/

 

[Flyfisher]

. . . , it will tell you the status of fibre to your exchange - "Coming Soon" or "Accepting Orders".

. . . or 'Under Evaluation' in my case

 

[Flyfisher]

eSATA: I bought a new PC with an eSATA port on the side a couple of years ago. I plugged in a brand new 1TB eSATA external drive. It didn't work. After much to-and-fro, I bought a card to go in one of the free slots inside, to provide 4 more internal SATA connections (why I'd need 8 I dunno, but hey!) and an external eSATA. The internal ones worked fine. The external one still didn't work. I tried a different eSATA drive. Didn't work - neither in the port on the side nor in the port on the card. My conclusion: eSATA is a myth. The cables are nice, though, with little latches to hold them in place.

Strange. eSATA isn't a different interface, just a slightly different connector. Did you have power connected to the external hard drive?

 

[Keithj]

Oh yes, the eSATA drive was powered up and good to go. It would connect sometimes, but crash the PC more often. It's now out of its (expensive) caddy and inside the PC on one of the 8 SATA ports, where it works flawlessly. The only problem is that I can't unplug it when not in use to stop the nasties infecting it if they get past the rest of the security.

Local exchange says FTTC is "Coming Soon" and has done for some months. The "site with the date" shows 31 March 2014. According to those who know, that will change to "30 June 2014" on the 31st March. I can wait.

 

[ReidS80]

For those who have fibre broadband, is it THAT much better?

 

[a twig]

I had it at my old place before we moved. Simple answer,"Yes it is."

Going from a connections between 40-60Mbit at our old place, to 6Mbit now has been a bit of a re-adjustment, especially when it comes to working from home.

That said, if all you use your connection for is e-mails and browsing then there is very little gain. As soon as you start doing video/gaming/large file transfers fibre optic is a god send.

Anyone on BT having problems with their homehubs, I cannot strongly recommend enough ditching it and buying your own mode/router (Netgear are pretty useful IMO) - it will definitely make a difference!

 

[Penners]

For those who have fibre broadband, is it THAT much better?

Speaking as one who has just experienced the difference, I can say quite emphatically YES.

As Twig says, if you previously had a downstream connection speed of, perhaps, 2 - 3 Mbps you won't see a great deal of difference with low-demand things like emailing and connecting to PPUK (although the latter is definitely quicker). But when it comes to up- or downloading large amounts of data, the difference is huge.

With my new Infinity connection (I've run a downstream speed test which showed about 37 Mbps), I have just downloaded my latest Photoshop CC update in about 6 minutes. The previous one, at my old connection speed of 2.5 Mbps, took about 50 minutes. I can run the BBC iPlayer at HD quality, and the ITV Player doesn't buffer at all (which it used to do constantly).

Mrs P is addicted to the BBC Radio iPlayer and Radio 4 Extra, which she plays through her computer constantly. This previously gobbled up bandwidth, frequently reducing my own connection to a frustrating crawl. That problem is completely banished.

The new Infinity connection also makes it a practical proposition to make use of Cloud storage of files. BY give me a chunk of free Cloud storage, and so does Microsoft, so I'm considering using this to store a large number of my older photograph files (of which I have almost 50,000 stored on my computer and in external drives!).