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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Expresscard - esats adapters?

J

Jeff Brown

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Hi chaps,

Does anyone have a recommendation for a macbook pro compatible expresscard/2 esata adapter? I've seen ones from sonnet, calldigit, dulce systems all rated at 300mbps. Any tips?

I'll be using it with the Lexar FW800 CF card reader and assumed that having my drives on the expresscard bus will be quicker than daisychaining the card reader and 2 drives on the FW800 bus....unless I'm mistaken?

Thanks

Jeff Brown
~708
 
I have the CalDigit one - Great card, just one eSATA port. Works great, even in Leopard, haven't tried Vista.

I also have the Rosewill one with two ports and it works great as well except their driver is broken in Leopard, some days it works, some days it doesn't. Works fine in Tiger and WinXP.
 
Good card paired with external enclosure

Good card paired with external enclosure

I have been having very good luck with my Apiotek Esata express/34 card paired with a 4 bay Sans Digital external enclosure. The only caveat to the above is that I have had problems with it working in Mac OS 10.5. I am sure support is just a matter of time. Works seamlessly under 10.4.11. I have it configured as JBOD (just a bunch of disks) with 2x western digital 750gb drives but played around with raid 0 and 5 as well.

http://www.apiotek.com/Global/Product/Notebook_Add-on_Card/EC-0003D.htm
http://www.sansdigital.com/mobilestor/ms4um.html

6980_1202739028.jpg
 
SonnetTempo SATA Express 34 - 2-Port ExpressCard/34 eSATA Controller

SonnetTempo SATA Express 34 - 2-Port ExpressCard/34 eSATA Controller

Tsataexpress34.jpg




I have a macbook pro running os 10.5.3
The sonnet driver version 1.1.9 says that it installs fine, but it doesn't get installed at all. Consequently when I plug in the card the computer freezes, when i unplug it the grey screen of death appears. Has anybody gotten this card to work on 10.5.3.

btw found this list of collected expresscard issues
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/feedback/express34_card_reports.html
 
I don't have any problems with the Express card from Sonnet in my MBP under 10.5.3 , it's giving me 118 MB/sec read and 107 write with a small two-disk striped array. Goes to sleep and awakes without any issues.

Regards,

Uli
 
nomad said:
I don't have any problems with the Express card from Sonnet in my MBP under 10.5.3 , it's giving me 118 MB/sec read and 107 write with a small two-disk striped array. Goes to sleep and awakes without any issues.

Regards,

Uli
Click to expand...

I have issues with either the sonnetcard or the WD drive attached when MPB goes to sleep since it always crashes after wake up.
 
I have a question for anyone with an expresscard 2 port eSata card. When you plug a drive and you look for it on system profiler, where does it appear to you?
For me they don't come under Serial-ATA but under SCSI instead. Performance is fine with a couple of disks. I guess it shouldn't make a big difference, but SMART monitoring isn't working with my drives.

Is this a driver issue? Do any of you have it working as native Sata? or SMART anyhow?

I have the silicon image SiI3132 1.1.9u drivers.
 
DaNni said:
I have a question for anyone with an expresscard 2 port eSata card. When you plug a drive and you look for it on system profiler, where does it appear to you?
For me they don't come under Serial-ATA but under SCSI instead. Performance is fine with a couple of disks. I guess it shouldn't make a big difference, but SMART monitoring isn't working with my drives.

Is this a driver issue? Do any of you have it working as native Sata? or SMART anyhow?

I have the silicon image SiI3132 1.1.9u drivers.
Click to expand...

Don't know if this will help you, but I have a SIIG Expresscard 54 2 port esata plugged into my Dell Inspiron 1705. Only recently have Vista Drivers become available to use it as a RAID 0 again (worked fine under Windows XP which was my original OS).

When I set it up, had to go into Administrative tools after using SIIG's drivers to get the two drives RAIDed, and format the drives as a new full sized volume drive. This in effect gave me the ability to assign a drive letter to the new RAID and now I can access it through Windows Explorer.

Best thing about this approach is that by setting up the volume in a certain way, I can get past the 2 TB limit and with the 1.5 TB Seagate drives available, could easily have 3 TBs of striped storage on my laptop.

Hope this helps.
 
The Rosewill works great, I've never had an issue with it and leopard
 
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