Why is eSATA adapter active?


Silent-Hunter

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I can't seem to find information on how the Pyra's eSATA adapter works. Why does it need to be an active adapter if the eSATA lanes are already on the extra USB 3 pins?
 
The only active components in the schematic are a SATA signal conditioner, and a voltage regulator for that chip. I guess it's better to recondition the signal as soon as it comes off the cable as far as you can do; doing it the other side of the fake USB 3.0 port risks more corruption as the connector will be inherently a little bit lossy I guess. And given it's got power from the USB side, why not put a couple of low power components on it?

There are also a few capacitors acting as power buffers I guess, and that's it for the component count I think.
 
I guess it's better to recondition the signal as soon as it comes off the cable as far as you can do; doing it the other side of the fake USB 3.0 port risks more corruption as the connector will be inherently a little bit lossy I guess.
The USB 3.0 port was designed to be actually usable as USB 3.0 if a future CPU board is able to support it, therefore SATA-specific components have to be either on the adapter or on the CPU board.

Putting it on the adapter likely also prevents breaking things if you try to use it in a wrong way, we're misusing a connector for something it wasn't designed for after all.
 
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