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This reminds me of the e-SATA port that was also a USB port.
eSATAp. (The p is for power!)
You can add these ports to a PC. With help from the motherboard and power supply, they'll support both USB and eSATA, including mechanical drives that need 12V power.
https://www.newegg.ca/en-labs-model-11-001-405/p/17Z-00AT-00001
With the right cable, you can plug bare drives into them, which is convenient for backups, imaging, etc.
eSATA seemed like it had potential but I can’t say I ever actually used it. I remember those ports, though. Might have a motherboard kicking around in storage with one.
I actually just bought a PCIe eSATA card to use with a 4 bay HDD enclosure. The ports kinda suck though
There was a brief period of time where eSATA was starting to show up and there were never enough USB 3 ports. eSATA would have been kind of handy but I've never used it either.
I used esata back in the day and I loved it. I had a second hard drive that I could plug into my laptop with all my games on it. This was back when SSDs were $1 per GB on a good day so 120GB SSDs were typical.
And even in the early days of USB 3 external HDDs were slow. It wasn’t until uasp became a thing that they didn’t suck outside of backing up large files.
eSATAp! What a wild combination.
Not actually a terrible idea, even if it frequently was limited to powering 2.5" drives due to a lack of 12V. Some had extra contacts for that, but most that I saw didn't.