eSATA Expresscard 34

mapexvenus said:

Can someone recommend an eSATA Expresscard that actually works well with Leopard? What data transfer speeds have you been able to achieve with it when connected to an external drive with an eSATA interface, and is it truly faster than FW800?

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cwa107 said:

I've yet to find one, but I can answer your latter query. ESATA is just another connector type on the same SATA bus that is inside of your computer. So, you have a theoretical rate of 3.0Gb/s, compared to an 800Mb/s rate for FW800. There are 1000Mb in a Gb, so theoretically, it should be more than 3 times the speed. I say theoretically, because hard drives simply can't transmit data at those speeds as the bus is not the bottleneck, but the drive technology itself.

The bottom line here is that if you want your external drive to function at the same speeds as an internal drive, you're best off with an ESATA adapter. FW800 will be comparable, but with ESATA, you're essentially using the same bus so it's an apples to apples comparison.

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mapexvenus said:

I bought a eSATA card recently and had to wait until the manufacturer released a beta leopard driver. When I finally tested it on a LaCie hard drive, I tested it by transferring a 1 GB file from my local HDD to the external drive. I found that it was actually slower than connecting via FW800. Even if the transfer speed of 3.0 Gb is theoretical, shouldn't it be faster than FW800? I am tempted to go out and buy a drive faster than FW 800 since I need the speed, but don't want to until I know that this works.

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