Expresscard eSATA Card

[wicker_man]

I am looking to buy an Expresscard (34 sized) two port eSATA card for my MacBook Pro (running 10.5 Leopard) for connecting some external hard drives.

Can anybody suggest any good ones available at a reasonable price (around £25)?

I have been using Firewire 800 drives which have pretty fast transfer rates, but I am going to buy a dual bay enclosure and most tend to have USB2 + eSATA connections and I want to take advantage of the speeds of eSATA.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

[Steve B]

http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=676547
would that one fit?

[wicker_man]

Thanks, that looks great!

I'm sure I checked Scan before, don't know how I must have missed it!

[wicker_man]

I've received the eSATA card and just thought I'd leave some comments.

There were drivers on the included CD for Mac OS X for the Si3132 card, which I installed and then plugged the card in. A little card icon appeared in the menu bar.

I have an external 2 bay hard drive which I will be using via eSATA.

When connecting a drive via eSATA, it copied some files to the external drive (from a 250GB 5400rpm internal SATA drive to a Samsung Spinpoint 1tb drive in an enclosure) and achieved an average write speed of 65mb/s (42.26GB in 644sec) which I though was pretty impressive. Copying to a Western Digital My Book Pro drive via Firewire 800 resulted in speeds around 40mb/s.

The Expresscard did get very hot after removing it from my MacBook Pro after the transfer.

I then tried plugging in an IcyBox IB-390 (with the Samsung Spinpoint 1tb drive) but it didn't show up. I tried again, and it did show up after a few seconds so I started copying some files over. A few seconds later, my laptop froze and then kernal panicked. I tried again after restarting, but it happened again. So, I'm guessing either the IcyBox is faulty, or it doesn't like the Si3132 chipset (anyone else experienced issues?)

[Unique]

this post caught my eye as i was thinking of getting an external esata drive to connect to my pc laptop. i was wondering what 2 bay esata external caddy you are using and how much it cost. and does it use 2 seperate esata cables externally or just one? i saw the 2 drive usb icybox on scan, which looks ideal apart from not having esata. most multidrive caddys seem to be NAS drives and quite expensive

[wicker_man]

I have a Mapower TB32 which has one USB2.0 and one eSATA connection. I purchased it on eBay for under £70 last week.

You can configure it to RAID0, RAID1, JBOD (no raid), SAFE33 or SAFE50.

It seems like a nice enclosure, however I am thinking of returning it because I have done some thinking and do not really need RAID, and would be better off with single drives (which would also work out cheaper). I may be selling my two Samsung 1TB drives soon (which have literally been used for a few hours), let me know if you are interested (I'll need to check requirements to make a classified ad).

[Unique]

thanks, i already have the drive, but the thought of paying almost the price of a 1TB drive for a caddy seems a bit crazy for my requirements. i was actually considering the other icy box you mentioned as it's about £20 and 1TB of "right there" fast access is probably enough as i can access the other drives from my network

[TheReaFireblade]

I have a Mapower TB32 which has one USB2.0 and one eSATA connection. I purchased it on eBay for under £70 last week.

It wouldn't happen to have been from AtLast Solutions Ebay store would it, because they claim to be "... the sole supplier of this product in the UK"?

Can you also confirm if you know the maximum size HDD it accepts - i.e. 2x 500GB/2x 750GB?

[wicker_man]

Yes, that's the company, two 1TB hard drives can be used in it (and they also sell them with hard drives, including 2x 1TB). I have purchased two 1TB Samsung drives to use in it.

I've also emailed Scan regarding the issue with the Icybox on Thursday, and will see what they say. If they accept a return, I may try swapping it for a different enclosure such as the Akasa P2, does anybody have any comments on it?