An administrator must attach a four-drive external disk shelf to a rack server. The link has to preserve native SATA features such as SMART, deliver up to 6 Gb/s throughput per drive, and work over a shielded cable length of roughly 2 m without a repeater. Which interface type will best satisfy these requirements?
eSATA is the external form factor of SATA, so its transport layer and command set are the same as internal SATA. This means features such as SMART, NCQ and TRIM are available without protocol translation. The eSATA-600 specification supports the full 6 Gb/s link speed defined for SATA 3.0 and allows a shielded cable run of up to 2 m, providing the performance and distance the scenario requires. USB 3.2 and Thunderbolt encapsulate storage traffic in other protocols and do not guarantee direct ATA command pass-through, while iSCSI over 10 GbE introduces network overhead and lacks native SATA command availability. Therefore, eSATA is the only option that meets all stated requirements.