Question e-SATA to USB converter

[ThundyUK]

Hi there,

I'm not sure really where best to place this post, so just took a punt.

I'm wondering if there's such a thing as an e-SATA to USB converter cable or active conversion box?
What it is, I have an NVR that has a 3TB built in HDD and I can expand the storage via e-SATA by another 8TB, however I'd rather use USB. No idea why this CCTV company is still using e-SATA ports over USB 3 at this point... but anyway.

The NVR CCTV box has an e-SATA port, and I'd like to plug in a USB external HDD.

Anyone know if such a thing exists / works well? I found a few things on Amazon but I'm just wondering if anyone has any experience or ideas of a product.



Ta

 

[Lutfij]

Maybe these will help;
https://www.amazon.com/esata-usb-cable/s?k=esata+to+usb+cable

 

[ThundyUK]

I think they're all the wrong way around. I have this feeling that the company who makes the CCTV system (Reolink) really needs to update their I/O.

I had another one where I have an eSATA dock with a 3.5" 4TB drive in but that dock isn't even made anymore.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/StarTech-c...ds=esata+enclosure&qid=1722284714&sr=8-9&th=1

This is similar - just looking for a smarter way of doing this without a £70 enclosure but not sure such a thing exists.

 

[BFG-9000]

No idea why this CCTV company is still using e-SATA ports over USB 3

It's because USB takes a tremendous amount of CPU power to move data over, and they don't want to include a CPU powerful enough to run a PC just to allow this since that would be expensive.

For example routers and cheap NAS devices tend to use 10 year old phone CPUs in them because they are now cheap (though wildly overclocked since they don't have to run off of battery so efficiency be damned) and only recently have those become fast enough to, at 100% CPU load mind you, saturate a gigabit connection when transferring data over USB 3.0. Back when the CPUs were only ~1GHz it was very rare for them to exceed USB 2.0 speeds (about 34MB/s) even over a USB 3.0 port, again at 100% CPU load just for the transfer so it would not be able to do anything else useful at the same time, like routing.

So your backwards adapter device idea would also require a seriously high-powered CPU in it. And that would be way more expensive than a simple e-SATA dock with internal drives plugged into it.