Slowly making its way onto more devices, the eSATA port has the advantage of enabling transfer speeds significantly higher than those offered by USB and FireWire. The downside is that most products can't provide power over the eSATA port meaning you'll need one more cable to hang around and provide the proper watts to eSATA devices. That's going to be a thing of the past though as the Power over eSATA specifications made by the Serial ATA International Organization enable both data and power to go through the same cable.

Adopting Power eSATA, MSI has started bragging with its current products which include this feature, and the list includes one motherboard (790FX-GD70 - the first AM3 board to have Power eSATA), and no less than eight notebooks - the NB PX600, GX620, GX720, GT735, EX620, EX623, EX630 and EX720. Other manufacturers will likely embrace Power over eSATA too but when it comes to the "world's first" title, MSI has already claimed it.