How much better are the eSata transfer rates over the USB transfer rates?

[hungarianhc]

Just looking to see if there would be a quantifiable performance increase moving from USB to eSata. I currently only have the USB sheevaplug. I was hoping that by now, I would be able to order a 2ghz plug w/ esata... but still just the same 1.2ghz CPU. I mean they were showing off 2ghz plugs at CES! In any case, i'm curious if someone has done before/after testing on USB/eSata. I think CPU utilization might go down a bit w/ esata.

[chaotix]

The performance increase should be substantial (depending on the drive, of course). USB maxes out at about 20-25MB/s.  With eSATA you should get nearly the "native" performance of the attached drive. 100MB/s should be no problem.

You can find some eSATA numbers at  http://plugcomputer.org/plugforum/index.php?topic=1783.0 for a RAID1 enclosure.