Which eSATA Expresscard (or FW800?)

You can buy the Sonnet Expresscard 34 easily in Canada. My local dealer has one that I plan to try tomorrow with an Addonics encrypted eSATA drive.
Accelerate Your Mac has a wealth of user reports on eSATA and FW800 Expresscard 34 cards, worth a look.

I'm using a Dual bay drive enclosure from Other World Computing (http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MESATATBEK/). It is strictly a esata enclosure which I think is better because there are no bridge-boards to deal with. If you don't need Firewire or USB connectivity for the drives, it's better to go without. Besides, this enclosue is cheaper than many of the "quad interface" enclosures many vendors sell. Hope this helps.

Another wrinkle …I've used Nextstar eSata/firewire and eSata/USB hooked to Sonnet Express card / MBPro 15" /Tiger OS for a couple of years with no problems at all. Though I'm buying only Seagate drives recently, some of the drives are other makes.

Just replaced my MBPro 120 internal original drive with a Seagate 320 7200 (another story, successful so far and easy to do if you're not overly timid).
Also (finally) installed Leopard, and did all the updating just today to start fresh.

Now the eSata-connected drives that mounted before, don't mount.

I also bought the NextStar usb/eSata dock so that I could migrate data from the old drive (once it was removed from the MBPro), and it wouldn't mount that either with eSata.
The drive dock works fine on my G5 (eSata ports provided by internal Sonnet pci X card), and the MBpro sees the drive through ethernet.

Just tried booting from the original drive (OSX 10.4+), now in the external drive dock, using usb.
It works! And the other drive mounts and works fine in the eSata enclosure …with a 1Tb drive.

From my experience (albeit short), it seems to have a lot to do with Leopard.

Hi Ron!

The Sonnet eSata ExpressCard uses the Silicon Image chipset for which the drivers are not included in Leopard. You have to install the drivers in order for your eSata card to be recognized. You can probably find them on Sonnet's web site or on Silicon Image's web site otherwise.

You can also look at the notes at the bottom of http://www.sonnettech.com/product/temposataexpress34.html. Some incompatibilities are listed.

Cheers!

JF

The Firmtek (Seritek) card has worked fine for me for 6 months or so. It did require driver installation.

Thanks Velum. I finally thought of looking for the drivers and found an updated one at Sonnet. I'm back in eSata business, though I still can't mount the drive I removed from the MacBookPro with eSata. Another challenge, but not a huge issue.

I would love to also jump into this thread.

Next month I have a live video gig, where I have to stream 3 movies (640x480, Photo-JPEG, 25fps) at the same time. My external drive offers FW800 and eSATA. Right now only use FW800 with my MacBook Pro.

Can anyone post a link to comparison (read & write speeds)?
Single external 7.200 drive: FW800 vs. eSATA

That would help me a lot.

Kind regards,
Jan

well i can say that Esata has effectively doubled my speed on my drives.

i have an lacie d2 quadra 500GB (only 1.5 esata) and a 1TB (full 3.0 esata)

i was running the 500gb drive with firewire 800 for months, and the esata (1.5) was an improvement.

When I got my 1TB, I could copy full 1080p movies, say 8-10gig, in 3mins. I had sustained read write on my drives of 100mb/s. This is with the stock 5200 rpm in the laptop itself.

currently i have the addonics card w/ port multiplier and I couldnt be happier. I think i bought my card for around 50 bucks shipped.

For a current test, i have torrents running at 208/100 download/upload kb/s to my 1tb drive, and running AJA system test, i am read/write to my drive at 85mb/s a 4gb 1080p 10bit test file.