Okay, got my new PC bits today and am putting it together, my mobo has eSATA ports and I have this SATA laptop hard drive I want to get 60GB of data off.
Am I correct in thinking that eSATA has to have a specific external drive case to provide the drive with power and that just plugging my lappy drive into my eSATA port with a regular SATA cable won't work?
Its just a bit of a pain to have the case open with the lappy drive plugged in and balancing on books or something whilst it copies

my mobo has eSATA ports and I have this SATA laptop hard drive I want to get 60GB of data off.
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The SATA cable is "L" shaped while the eSATA cable is "T" shaped, so it's not compatible.
I have a external hard drive with eSata and it has its own DC IN plug, although there are some that purge electricity directly from the eSATA cable.

Well, for what it's worth . . . =)
The easiest way is to create a network with your box and laptop via your router. I have a shared folder from my box on the laptop desktop and the same on my box. Both computers need to be a member of the same work-group but . . . you can transfer data between the two with ease. I do this by hardwire rather than a wireless for the laptop.
I mentioned an active cooling enclosure in your other post. I use it to backup both my box and laptop via an eSata cable. My laptop does not have an external eSata connector so I use an eSata card.
The enclosure connects to any computer with an external eSata connector. The enclosure I mention above comes with all the cables you need for your box. If your laptop has the external connector already it just a matter of transferring the data to the drive and plugging it into your box to transfer the data to the box.
Edit: transferring via USB is a pain and yes, any drive connected to an eSata connector must have power. You can open your box an rig it using power from your MB but . . . =)
Edit2: Seems like they have "network" ready external drives as well, just plug them into your router and all computers in the work-group have access. I will look for a link. Here is a link to an example. Never used one so I am not recommending it other than an example. I like my externals to have active cooling having had two fail.
Edit3: I would NOT connect eSata to eSata between the two computers. . I don't know if that is possible but it just seems like a fail IMHO . . . =)

I've got this external USB hard drive of about 400Gb, and I use it as Backup/mode of transportation of data. Like Stuff wrote, you could make a wireless lan work group connection, but I'm not sure about the speed of such a process.

Heh I have a degree in network engineering, the thought of a network did occur. In fact I dumped my steamapps folder which is 95% of the data I want to save across the network last night and it took nearly 4 hours (58gb made up of multiple thousand small files so it runs slower than normal), the eSATA was just an idea to save myself another exceptionally long delay. I'll just whack the lappy drive in via SATA I think, much easier

Sounds like a good plan . . . =)
I had a similar problem when i bought my first box with eSata. It had no EIDE connections so I had to buy a EIDE card to get data off my old drives. Network was just too sloooooow.

Good information, thanks.
I have never tried that . . . sounded like a sure way to kill your MB or drive . . . =)

Thats kind of what I thought, my workaround of using esata would be mildly more inconvenient than the inconvenience I was trying to avoid in the first place