What do you guys do with your ExpressCard/34 slot?

[hippo206]

I stick my finger in it to make sure the spring loaded mechanism is still fully functional, other than that, nothing.

ditto

 

[zho40]

I have a Kyocera EVDO card in mine.

 

[GaryPDX]

The eSata spec speed-wise is exactly the same as normal SATA, so you'll get massive speed, faster than FW800. For the ultimate MacBook Pro ProTools rig, it would be fantastic. If you're using a Firewire interface, it also leaves the FW controller to do only audio, which I believe is a good idea when dealing with a whole bunch of 24/96 tracks going in and out.

I have a MBP Core Duo (2006) which only has a FW400 port and the eSATA is much faster than that. My machine won't boot from the Express Card eSATA adapter I have, which is a Sonnet Tempo but will boot from the FW400 drive, so I always get enclosures that have eSATA and FW ports--and by that point you are usually gonna get a USB 2.0 as well.

I was one of the unfortunates affected by the recent Seagate drive firmware fiasco. Seagate issued a primitive FreeDOS bootable iso image with a firmware updater on it. After burning this to a CD, to my shock and amazement, my MBP booted into FreeDOS from the CD! It was really weird seeing my MBP running 15 year old DOS. Moreover, the software was able to see the drive through the eSATA card and update the firmware. I mention this because apparently users of other brands of eSATA cards did not report this happy result, and users of FW connected Seagate drives did not generally have success either. So, I kind of like the Sonnet product.

 

[ruftytufty]

faster than 800 yes, but not massively. Transfering from internal->esata or viceversa, I get roughly 75MB/s vs my FW800 getting about 50 (thats with a 2.5 HD also).

Now esata to esata, i see constant 100MB/s, thats massive.

The limitation in your internal<->esata tests is the transfer speed of your internal drive, not the interface speed.
Drive transfer speed is probably also the limitation w/your esata->esata test. With an appropriate RAID setup, eSATA can produce real-world sustained transfers of well over 200MB/sec.

Theoretical max of FW800 is about 70MB/sec (800Mb/sec less overhead bits).

 

[catdog02481]

I have an eSATA express card in it which is hooked up to a 4-unit raid configured in raid 5 with 4 1TB hard drives. I use is for both my time machine and for archiving specific items of importance.
Removing the express/34 slot was a big no-no for me.
Glad it's still on the 17" MBP

 

[edoates]

The eSata spec speed-wise is exactly the same as normal SATA, so you'll get massive speed, faster than FW800. For the ultimate MacBook Pro ProTools rig, it would be fantastic. If you're using a Firewire interface, it also leaves the FW controller to do only audio, which I believe is a good idea when dealing with a whole bunch of 24/96 tracks going in and out.

You won't get as much as the maximum data transfer speed (DTS) would indicate. Each time you add a track to ProTools and simultaneously play them all back, the disk must seek to to retrieve each tracks next block. So unless you have of of those Velociraptor 10,000RPM drives with the very fast seek times, seeks dominate the performance calculations. Even FW800 doesn't help much of FW400.

You get the best performance (with FW400, 800, or eSata) by having several drives dedicated to ProTools audio, and using PT to round robin track assignment. Various forms of RAID actually slow down PT (according to Digi, and it makes sense).

I routinely do 32 tracks on my PT HD Accel system (MacPro Intel 2.66 quad) on a single FW800 drive. If I have a project that needs more than that, I'll round robin a second drive.

See the Digidesign site for information about disk requirements, maximum track counts, etc.

Eddie O

 

[Teej guy]

You won't get as much as the maximum data transfer speed (DTS) would indicate. Each time you add a track to ProTools and simultaneously play them all back, the disk must seek to to retrieve each tracks next block. So unless you have of of those Velociraptor 10,000RPM drives with the very fast seek times, seeks dominate the performance calculations. Even FW800 doesn't help much of FW400.

You get the best performance (with FW400, 800, or eSata) by having several drives dedicated to ProTools audio, and using PT to round robin track assignment. Various forms of RAID actually slow down PT (according to Digi, and it makes sense).

I routinely do 32 tracks on my PT HD Accel system (MacPro Intel 2.66 quad) on a single FW800 drive. If I have a project that needs more than that, I'll round robin a second drive.

See the Digidesign site for information about disk requirements, maximum track counts, etc.

Eddie O

Cool, thanks for the heads up Eddie. What FW800 drive do you have? I'm looking to purchase one that works well with Pro Tools.

 

[macinsanity]

I fill mine up with peanut butter for when I get hungry...

Oh and I used to put in an eSATA card occasionally but I got tired of how quirky the eSATA was. My Apiotek card always crashed my computer unless I followed an exact sequence to disconnect. I couldn't just eject and then unplug. I had to eject, turn off the power, then unplug.

The stiffness of the cables was also annoying, I even bought flexible cables. There was also a huge amount of latency when running a VMWare VM from an eSATA attached drive. Its seems faster with Firewire 800, but this might just be my cheap card.