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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 :)

Which eSATA card for my MBP?

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Karel Bata

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I thought all these were much the same and used the Silicon Image SiI 3132 SATALink Controller. Not so. I've been getting huge probs with two cheap cards I've got (I know, I know) so I'm looking at getting a Sonnet card. But which? There's a huge difference in price:

The Tempo 2 goes for £39 (Manual)
While the Tempo 2 Pro is £149. (Manual)


I'm only planning to use this for data wrangling to G-Tech drives, so I don't really need some of the advanced functions of the Pro version. But does it perform substantially better?

Any one using either, or both?
 
Does yours allow hotplugging? It's a real pain to have to power down completely each time I move the MBP.

Yes, they do all look uncannily similar, but I have two cheaps ones and there are subtle differences, so it's not just rebadging. And after downloading and installing Sonnet drivers my system kept crashing (thank god for Time Machine!) so there must also be differences inside.

I can't find any info about this on the net, so if any one can illuminate us...
 
Cheers Dusty,

It rather looks like it's worth the money. Wish I'd bought it in the first place, but someone at Micro Anvika said to just buy a card, no mention there were different types... doh!
 
The Sonnet Pro is great and I recommend. There is only one other eSATA card that I'll recommend for the MBP and that is the CalDigit one. It's a solid performer, full hot-plug ability, possibly a bit better than the Sonnet card, but only has one port. I own both the CalDigit and the Sonnet Pro and they are excellent.
 
Cheers Jeff.

The downside is that I've always had a policy of carrying two of everything, so it's a bit of a hefty outlay for what it does. Having a duplicate is not only good for obvious reasons, but it also makes tracking down a fault so much easier.

I wish the connections inspired more confidence...
 
Mine is inconsistent. Sometimes hotplugging is OK. Other times it forces a reboot. But otherwise it's fine. Since I never unplug during a transfer, it's not been a massive issue, but of course can see why it would be useful to be able to hotplug!
 
Hmm...

Be careful. When I said I had probs I meant it completely screwed my system and I had to go back with Time Machine which on FW took several hours. The external drive got totally screwed and had to be reformatted. It could have been inappropriate drivers, but I suspect the card may have slipped out while using the drive. Fortunately it happened at home and I keep multiple copies of everything. But it was sobering...

With some models there's meant to be an icon somewhere that you click to power off the card before removing it. If you're not aware of one (and we all skip-read the manuals for these things) maybe it's worth checking.
 
Good reminder Karel - I completely forgot about that card power off icon in my screen top right!! :smile:
 
Both ExpressCard and ESATA are hot-pluggable per their specs. Therefore any properly implemented card and companion software is hot-pluggable.

The Sonnet Tempo Pro is hot-pluggable. I'm assuming their non-pro single port version is too, but I don't own that one. The CalDigit card is also a solid performer and is fully hot-pluggable. I recommend both the Sonnet Pro and CalDigit cards.
 
Speed?

Speed?

can anyone tell the speed diff between the eSata and FW800?
 
FW800 is 800Mbps, which translates to 95MB/s less the overhead for the connection.

Most all eSATA solutions are 3Gbps per SATA header and that is 3.75X faster than FW800. However if you're running from an ExpressCard slot, then the SATA header is bottlenecked by the Expresscard interface. Expresscard is 2.5Gbps plus additional latency and overhead, so about 3X faster in that situation.

Anyway 3Gbps = 3000Mbps = 357MB/s less overhead.

Via ExpressCard, the maximum bandwidth for an eSATA connection would be 298MB/s.

Real-world numbers are typically lower than these due to several factors. These are absolute maximums for the standards.
 
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