Esata Card Has anyone used them?

I'm looking at getting an esata card as firewire 800 drives are so expensive and esata seems to come as standard with most new external drives. has anyone installed one in there macpro? I have a big editing job coming up and want the speed. I have installed 2 500gb (500gb in each bay now) and raided them but want something for extra storage and back up.

I was thinking of buying this card but would welcome any recommendations!

ESATA CARD

Also sonnet have brought out a cable that is supposed to connect to the motherboard directly but I'm a little worried about messing around with stuff thats hidden.

Sonnet eSATA Extender Cable for Mac Pro

Do you have a Power Mac? The Mac Pro supports 4 HD's.

The only eSATA externals I see have also have FireWire.

If you do have a Power Mac, tell is which model you have. Each model is different inside.

Mac Specs: Mac Pro quad 2.66, 5gb Ram, ATI 512mb X1900 XT, 4x500gb.

I'm looking to get a raid set up for my external so was looking at firewire 800 drives but esata set seem to have better write speed.

Yes, eSATA is faster.

Sorry, I was so confused with your first post. By both drives, I thought you meant two drive bays were full, not four.

That LaCie card will work fine though. Why not buy a pair or enclosures and toss two of the 500GB drives in them and buy a pair of 1TB HD's for the inside?

Experience with those SATA Motherboard ports

I have two 500gb SATA drives installed in optical drive bay 2 as a RAID-1. These drives are using those two motherboard SATA ports and I haven't had any problems with operation.

However, when I took my MacPro to the Apple store Genius Bar, I was informed that those ports are not intended for customer use. They are for Apple tech support use only. I believe that they connect their equipment there to diagnose problems. They said that I'd have to remove my extra drives, re-install the optical drive cage and remove the cables to the motherboard before they would help me with my unrelated complaint. They said this after they had my machine in their back room for 20 minutes. When I got home, I discovered that they didn't reconnect one of these drives to the motherboard and that the RAID set was degraded. When I plugged the loose cable back into the motherboard, the RAID started rebuilding.

Cool how easy was it to fit? I'm thinking of getting the card simply because I can't afford for anything to go wrong got big editing job coming up + i want external as I will need take drive down to london for grading - But I may do the optical in the future.