The Serial ATA International Organization have been working for some time now in order to simplify the eSATA interface. Their main goal is to eliminate the need for a separate power cable, thus simplifying the design of the interconnections.

The organization today announced its Power Over eSATA initiative, a new specification set that will provide power to the external SATA (eSATA) devices on the very data cables. The external drive will be supplied directly from the host system through the Power Over eSATA cable. The new specification set is important, because it is designed to maintain backwards compatibility with the normal eSATA interconnects, while retaining its high performance at the current maximum interface transfer rate of 3Gb/s.

"Its fast transfer rate and efficient protocol makes eSATA the highest performing external mainstream storage connection," said Knut Grimsrud, SATA-IO president and Intel Fellow. "Enhancing eSATA with power delivery will provide a new level of convenience to the designer and the end user. By eliminating the need for a separate power connection, customers can more easily expand their storage, making Serial ATA an even more attractive solution for mainstream storage applications."

At the moment, the eSATA devices require a separate power adapter to supply the drive with the necessary voltage. The new project will bring the world a new eSATA interface that eliminates the need of the additional power adapter.

Power Over eSATA solutions are expected to hit the market starting the second half of 2008. The first devices to emerge will be either SATA hard-disk drives or SATA optical drives in a portable external enclosure. This will be extremely appealing especially to the notebook users, who will be spared the hassle of carrying along the external power supply. The eSATA disk drives are extremely fast and are generally used for back-up purposes as well as alternative storage media in the mobile world.