The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO), the consortium that helped develop the SATA interface,has announced its Power Over eSATA initiative, which will allow external SATA (eSATA) devices to draw on power from their attached device.

This will eliminate the pesky power cable, usually with a fat power adapter at the plug end. This will finally make eSATA devices comparable to FireWire, which draw their power from the attached device. Since the USB 2.0 spec will support the 3Gbits/sec. sustained throughput, those external drives will be pretty quick, too.

Power Over eSATA products are expected to be available on the market as soon as the second half of 2008.