A general whine here today, but a while back, probably 2009 or so, the rage was laptops with eSATA ports, for faster external storage. USB3 was a glimmer, and FW800 seemed to be relegated to the Mac world.

My new (at the time) Dell Latitude had this eSATA port, and I was running a lot of VMs on VMWare Workstation, and more bandwidth was desirable.

So I bought a high performance Seagate eSATA external drive (7200 rpm drive in an enclosure), and thought for sure I was golden.

It worked. Kind of. For a little while. Then the disk would “vanish” and poof, my VM’s were gone. Rebooting the laptop (running Win7 x64 Enterprise) would bring them back.

For about a half hour.

Then I got an HP EliteBook with, you guessed it, an eSATA port. Same thing. This time I wasn’t running VMs, but just augmenting the pathetic 100gb HD they gave me (talk about LAME).

Then USB-3 became widely available, and I dropped that eSATA external into a drawer.

eSATA, the standard that never really was.

(I’m sure someone was successful with them, but I wasn’t. A cursory google search shows that my experience was far from unique.)