No need for AC power anymore

Just recently, MSI showed off its new upcoming list of eight notebooks and one motherboard sporting the new Power Over eSATA cable specification. It has happily taken claim to the title of “world’s first”, as the new specification made by the Serial ATA International Organization enables both data and power to be transferred between motherboard and device through a single cable.





Up until now, the eSATA standard has required its own power connector.  While it can reach transfer rates triple those of USB 2.0 and FireWire 400, this has been its major drawback. With Power Over eSATA, backwards compatibility with existing eSATA connectors will be retained along with the current data transfer performance levels of 3Gb/s.

Deployment plans for the Power Over eSATA standard have been around for over a year, with the first press release from SATA-IO dating January 2008.




The Power Over eSATA cable itself bridges from a single eSATA port to a connector that includes the normal SATA power and data connectors. During the start, many cables like this will be around but as time goes on, we should start seeing standard everyday eSATA cables that can transmit both data and power. More details are expected to be revealed very soon at Computex 2009 in a few weeks.