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flang

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 11, 2012
132
12
eSATA or FW800? I need more ports for drives. If so, whose?
OWC has an eSATA but no FW800.
 

velocityg4

macrumors 604
Dec 19, 2004
7,330
4,724
Georgia
eSATA is faster especially if it is SATA II/III. Why not just get a USB 3.0 card for external drives? Those drives are the cheapest and easiest to find.
 

flang

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 11, 2012
132
12
having had near death experiences live, with wart drives, I only buy with internal supplys, IEC.
Which kind of means Glyph or others like.
If someone made a wart drive with a real power supply with real cable and a screw lock, then ....
 
Last edited:

velocityg4

macrumors 604
Dec 19, 2004
7,330
4,724
Georgia
Since you were asking about eSATA and FW800. I assumed you wanted a regular external hard drive.

Anyways, I'd do USB 3.x card or eSATA card to an external 4-bay enclosure which uses a regular computer power cable to an internal PSU then. I'd steer clear of FW800 as it is quite slow. Slower than sequential read/write speeds for modern high capacity HDD.

This Syba may meet your external requirements. It does both eSATA and USB 3.0. Making it easy to connect to another Mac if needed (not simultaneously).

Perhaps pair it with this card.

This card costs more but offers eSATA and USB 3.0.
 

EugW

macrumors G5
Jun 18, 2017
14,738
12,695
eSATA and FW800 are both dead technologies.

I say this as an owner of drives that support eSATA and FW800. Or at least I was until last month. I still have a couple, but I've removed the drives from almost all of them now... since eSATA and FW800 are both dead technologies.

What is this to be used for? What about PCIe SSD?
 

flang

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 11, 2012
132
12
eSATA and FW800, though "dead" are very much of use for me with a obsolete MP3,1 running "dead" Mavs & "dead" PT10HDn with an old UA Apollo.
a PCIe 2TB-SSD is around $200.
a PCIe eSATA card $20.
 
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