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Need help with eSATA

L

Lurgen

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Hi all,

When my Mac Pro arrives, I plan on chucking quite a bit of storage into it. Two of the drives that will be used are currently connected to my PC, and are eSATA drives. Since I need to be able to transport them fairly regularly, I figured I'd connect them to the two "spare" SATA ports on the motherboard through the use of a backplate adaptor.

Unfortunately, I've recently read that these two ports aren't usable under Bootcamp, so I think I need to buy a second SATA controller that both Windows and OSX can see.

What I'd love to hear is advice on which expansion card to buy. Ideally, I want to be able to drive up to four external hard disks with it. It doesn't absoltely have to have eSATA ports on it, normal SATA ports are easily re-routed to external connectors so that's not a big deal to me. Ideally I don't want spend a whole lot on the card though, since the drives won't be used for RAID or high-performance tasks (one drive will be for Time Machine, the other for data I transport between work and home, usually large images and files).

I know I can achieve both of these objectives with USB, but I would prefer to retain the performance level that I have grown used to with eSATA.
 
what eSATA to buy

I have only good experience with FirmTek. You can boot windows form this though they will tell you that you cant, I have a 2 port seritek that I boot vista from now and vista comes with support for the drivers, it will install its-self. Also, note it wont show up with option key boot, you have to select under start up disk. I'm doing it now and with paragon read and write to ntfs partition from the mac side as well, no hassle transferring files to each OS. Just google it, you will find it.
 
I have the Sonnet Tempo SATA E4P - a four port e-sata card. Works great for me. I have a 4 drive raid plugged into it, two LaCie e-sata drives and another Hot swappable drive bay. I don't think you can boot from it but I'm fairly sure it works in Bootcamp (never had a reason to test it).

They also make a much cheaper 2 port card called the Tempo SATA E2P.

I also have a Tempo SATA ExpressCard/34 which allows me to plug two e-sata drives into my MacBook Pro.

I've never had any problems with either of the cards I own.
 
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