The Serial ATA International Organization, or SATA-IO, has released a press release about an upcoming change to the eSATA standard, which will allow for drives to draw power directly from the eSATA connector. It will henceforth be known as Power Over eSATA.

This is all good news, but we have to ask one question: shouldn't this have been done from day one? Although not much has been revealed about the new powered eSATA standard, we can apparently expect to see products ready by  the 2H of 2008, which isn't that far away.

The new connector will be backward compatible with current eSATA devices and our guess would be that the power connectors will end up on the oposite end of the connector to the data pins. It should be easy enough to do this for 2.5-inch hard drives and flash drives, but we're not sure how much power that the Power Over eSATA connector will deliver; so don't expect your eSATA RAID setup to be able to draw its power from the connector.

You can find the press release here (PDF)