I have seen a few DIY guides for adding esata capabilities to your Imac to be able to access far cheaper hard drives or RAID enclosures. I too, am no stranger to the guts of my own Imac having added a SSD, taking up the 3rd sata port on my board and replacing my 1TB drive with a 3TB drive with fan controller software.
I recently saw photos of someone taking out their airport card and installing an esata controller in its place to get 2 esata ports coming out the bottom of their machine. I also want to be able to access my colleagues usb 3.0 portable drives at speed and saw a card that has both esata and usb 3.0. I have a couple questions for those that know out there.
1) What is the bandwidth of the PCI connection that the airport card is attached to? Am I better off taking out my Super drive and running a cable out my machine to my RAID enclosure from its SATA port?
2) has anyone had any experience with this card? It seems like it would do the trick. Obviously having to remove the bracket and configure a new one coming out next to my RAM on the bottom of my machine. I'm just wondering if there is enough room to fit it in there.
If I DIDNT go trailblazing and hacking up my box, I would probably go Thunderbolt to express/34 and get a USB 3.0 card AND an esata card and just change them out as needed, but wanted to avoid that and honestly, the thought of having a couple esata ports, a couple USB ports and still keeping the sata port inside for a super drive (which I DO use somewhat regularly or maybe even upgrading that to a Blu-ray at some point) tickles my fancy.
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/CalDigit/FASTA6GU3/
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. New to DIY stuff, don't know a whole lot about what exactly is happening in the software or on the main board as far as bandwidth and data movement goes, but good with my hands, have a nice clean workshop and am comfortable taking apart machines, have dremel, drills, whatever I need.
thanks!
I recently saw photos of someone taking out their airport card and installing an esata controller in its place to get 2 esata ports coming out the bottom of their machine. I also want to be able to access my colleagues usb 3.0 portable drives at speed and saw a card that has both esata and usb 3.0. I have a couple questions for those that know out there.
1) What is the bandwidth of the PCI connection that the airport card is attached to? Am I better off taking out my Super drive and running a cable out my machine to my RAID enclosure from its SATA port?
2) has anyone had any experience with this card? It seems like it would do the trick. Obviously having to remove the bracket and configure a new one coming out next to my RAM on the bottom of my machine. I'm just wondering if there is enough room to fit it in there.
If I DIDNT go trailblazing and hacking up my box, I would probably go Thunderbolt to express/34 and get a USB 3.0 card AND an esata card and just change them out as needed, but wanted to avoid that and honestly, the thought of having a couple esata ports, a couple USB ports and still keeping the sata port inside for a super drive (which I DO use somewhat regularly or maybe even upgrading that to a Blu-ray at some point) tickles my fancy.
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/CalDigit/FASTA6GU3/
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. New to DIY stuff, don't know a whole lot about what exactly is happening in the software or on the main board as far as bandwidth and data movement goes, but good with my hands, have a nice clean workshop and am comfortable taking apart machines, have dremel, drills, whatever I need.
thanks!
