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E-sata Express card , which one actually works.

alphaod said:
The only problem is that it gets jammed inside my slot and I have to wiggle it a lot to free it.
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Sound better than what I experienced with two different ExpressCards yet: both could be pulled out of the slot easily without needing to unlock them first (by pushing them). That's quite problematic when you are trying to pull a cable out of the card and may even hang the system (did so with a Firewire card I tried before).
 
To get back to the original question, the Sonnet Tempo works, plain and simple. Yeah, almost $300 for it, but it is pro quality, works like it was made by Apple for Apple.

I purchased one with a couple quad interface drives from OWC and never had one hitch, hickup, or hacking cough about it. I have the 2009 17 inch MB Pro (with the little tassels hanging off the side for decoration).

You ALWAYS get what you pay for when buying new, unless you get something at a fire sale from a Mac person.

My suggestion is to spend the money and avoid the frustration.

I reviewed what to get from this guy...
http://macperformanceguide.com/Mac-RecommendedHardwareMBP.html

Yeah, I thought about the others but when you know something will work, I have learned from doing the same thing in photography to just buy the better stuff and sleep better at night.

Oh, also, eSATA is so good that Photoshop scratch and other uses works so good you would think you are working off the internal drive. I get transfer rates of 1GB/10 seconds (or 100 MB/sec) when transferring data between one eSATA connected drive to another eSATA drive for backup). The speed is much faster from internal drive to the eSATA. I can only imagine what eSATA would be like on a Mac Pro vs my MB Pro.

Guy Mancuso said:
I know the Sonnet Tempo SATA Pro ExpressCard/34 is supposed to work on the new unibody but after all that I bought to get this system up to the speed I need, was trying to avoid another 280 dollars and want another 4gb Ram chip more. http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Sonnet Technology/SATAIIPROE34/
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Thanks I know Lloyd very well and he did suggest that card but with all the big expenses of the SSD , Ram and over 4k later . I thought I would save 150 dollars and the caldigit is working really well with 100mbs/sec both ways which is really good. I have only one e-sata external drive at the moment and as far as scratch not working any faster than the 2 SSD running Raid 0 . So i need to add another external and run that Raid 0 for scratch to get any gain. When I do that than I will switch the e-sata card but the calidigit does have some good transfer rate. So I still have a little more expansion to do. About another 80 for the drive 90 for the box and 290 for the Sonnet than I can Raid 0 the external. The biggest upgrade will be going E class SSD intels running Raid 0. Just waiting for price to drop than sell off my 2 M SSD than it's possible a external scratch maybe underpowered so I will have to figure that part out. Main goal is being portable so the E class SSD are more the push. My biggest push is Raw processing and scratch there is no help since I am NOT using a Adobe product which scratch would be helpful. Using Capture One and that is a combination of being hungry for HD speed , cores and Ram but not scratch. But right now CS4 products are going very fast but scratch could certainly help on the big files with layers and such.
 
I just got a BC368 but on ebay says BC338, what's the difference between the two? I just did a quickbench on BC368 and it's somewhat slower/on par with FW800 when I should be hitting 100mb/sec
 
I thought there would be more of a difference between the two:rolleyes:

BC368 eSATA (left) - FW800 (right)
 

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It's a OWC 7200rpm and on their site they're able to hit 100mb/sec +. Thanks for the input:)
 
advan031 said:
It's a OWC 7200rpm and on their site they're able to hit 100mb/sec +. Thanks for the input:)
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What's your internal disk? That might be limiting if it's not an SSD. No 7200 rpm 2.5" notebook drives go past 100 mB/s.
 
I've just bought the AKE BC338 from ebay and am having trouble getting it to work on Mac OS 10.4.10 on my MBP 2.4GHz Mid 2007 model. Has any one else tried it with any Mac OS 10.4.X version? I see the express card icon in the menu bar next to clock but when I connect a drive it doesn't mount (hot plugging it in). I'm wondering whether it is a problem with my external drive enclosure (2.5" Integral USB+ESATA enclosure/2.5" Seagate 7200.3 320GB) or the antiquated OS, so if any one else has tried in on 10.4.X I'd be interested to hear their experiences.

I have tried rebooting with the esata drive already connected to the BC388 but my machine fails to boot, showing a no entry sign and a whirling icon forever. Does any one know what the no entry sign means??

I've also tried installing this driver from the JMicron site but it makes no difference. http://www.jmicron.com/Driver.htm
 
jakecollins said:
I've just bought the AKE BC338 from ebay and am having trouble getting it to work on Mac OS 10.4.10 on my MBP 2.4GHz Mid 2007 model. Has any one else tried it with any Mac OS 10.4.X version? I see the express card icon in the menu bar next to clock but when I connect a drive it doesn't mount (hot plugging it in). I'm wondering whether it is a problem with my external drive enclosure (2.5" Integral USB+ESATA enclosure/2.5" Seagate 7200.3 320GB) or the antiquated OS, so if any one else has tried in on 10.4.X I'd be interested to hear their experiences.

I have tried rebooting with the esata drive already connected to the BC388 but my machine fails to boot, showing a no entry sign and a whirling icon forever. Does any one know what the no entry sign means??

I've also tried installing this driver from the JMicron site but it makes no difference. http://www.jmicron.com/Driver.htm
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Sorry for asking the obvious, but is the external drive plugged in? eSATA isn't powered like USB.
 
Thiol said:
Sorry for asking the obvious, but is the external drive plugged in? eSATA isn't powered like USB.
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The external enclosure comes with a power lead which connects to a USB socket to obtain power when using ESATA. I've connected it and the power light shows on the drive and I can feel it spinning, so must be powered up I guess.
 
It works and that is all I care about and it is fast. End of the day with clients on the line with there data that is all that counts. It's fast enough I can actually work from that external if I wanted to.
 
Do you have any numbers from QuickBench that you can post with that card?

Guy Mancuso said:
It works and that is all I care about and it is fast. End of the day with clients on the line with there data that is all that counts. It's fast enough I can actually work from that external if I wanted to.
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100 mgs/per second transfer rates is the average

Peaked at 112 going from external to desktop

Peaked at 107 going from SSD internals to External which is a 7200 32mg cache WD 640 Black drive
 
I've got the AEK one just arrived today and I remember somebody saying that I should expect the X-25M external to run as fast as internal over eSata. That's not exactly happening right now. It's still a lot quicker than a hard drive over eSata but I just figure the cheap enclosure is the driving factor.

Guy Mancuso said:
100 mgs/per second transfer rates is the average
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steffi said:
I've got the AEK one just arrived today and I remember somebody saying that I should expect the X-25M external to run as fast as internal over eSata. That's not exactly happening right now. It's still a lot quicker than a hard drive over eSata but I just figure the cheap enclosure is the driving factor.
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I think in another thread I told you that you should get the same eSATA performance as with an internal drive. I think I'm wrong. I noticed before (and actually mentioned it in a different thread) that the combo USB/eSATA interfaces often limit you to 150 MB/sec. Are you using an enclosure with such an interface?

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/669809/

Also, the Oyen enclosure might not do you any better. Note that their specs hit the speed limit near what you observe.

http://oyendigital.com/portable-combo-hard-drive.html
 
Yes the cheap enclosures I have are USB2/eSata only. That must be a common chipset then.

I would suspect you need FW 800/eSata enclosure with Oxford 924 to get the best out of eSata. The issue for me is what sort of performance increase would I be seeing if I chose to upgrade to one of those enclosures.

So the Oyen enclosure is also capped at 150 mb/s

What isn't?

Thiol said:
I think in another thread I told you that you should get the same eSATA performance as with an internal drive. I think I'm wrong. I noticed before (and actually mentioned it in a different thread) that the combo USB/eSATA interfaces often limit you to 150 MB/sec. Are you using an enclosure with such an interface?

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/669809/

Also, the Oyen enclosure might not do you any better. Note that their specs hit the speed limit near what you observe.

http://oyendigital.com/portable-combo-hard-drive.html
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Oyen uses the Oxford 924. I'm not sure of this, but I think it's more the combo USB/eSATA interface rather than the chipset that is rate limiting. I have a Voyager Q with Oxford 934 and a separate eSATA port. I'll give that a try tomorrow, but I'll be using my Mac Pro. My eSATA card hasn't arrived from Hong Kong yet...

steffi said:
Yes the cheap enclosures I have are USB2/eSata only. That must be a common chipset then.

I would suspect you need FW 800/eSata enclosure with Oxford 924 to get the best out of eSata. The issue for me is what sort of performance increase would I be seeing if I chose to upgrade to one of those enclosures.

So the Oyen enclosure is also capped at 150 mb/s

What isn't?
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Here is the Caldigit data http://eshop.macsales.com/item/CalDigit/FASTA1EX/

Here is the Sonnet that is claiming 200 mg/per second sustained and will run two e-sata which I may go for to Run Raid 0 outside the MBP. Still debating this. The new MF back I just bought is a 31mpx camera that outputs 168 mg Tiff files so just put more pressure on Raw Processing and trying to decide if I really need it http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Sonnet Technology/SATAIIPROE34/

Here is the enclosure I have right now. Cheap and quiet
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MEFW924AL1K/

This has the Oxford chipset
 
flanamac said:
?? I know this references Enterprise class, but what is the benefit of E-class over other classes, if you don't mind?
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Enterprise usually means servers with high amount of IO, because a lot of people will be accessing the drives; servers are also hot so components will be stressed; to minimize bottlenecks, components need minimum delay. So you pay a price premium for all these things.
 
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