Express Card Bus Bottle Neck

Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
I'm looking for a high speed solution for my video setup. My station travels with me, so it needs to be robust.



Typically I go FW800 into the laptop and then ESATA out to a drive. I'd like to transfer even faster, but I know I cannot surpass the speed of the drive itself. Still... I've had some mechanical issues with the FW800 port. It's mission critical that I find something more robust.



If I used an express card ESATA adapter to transfer data from one ESATA drive (raid 0) to another ESATA drive (raid 0), would my data rate be still limited by the drives? Or would there be a bottle neck at the express card bus? I can't test it myself as my drives are usually supplied by the client and I don't have one of my own at the moment.



Thank you in advance.



-Jeff

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 1
    kmac1036kmac1036 Posts: 281member
    I have a eSATA card from Rosewill. most, really ALL, of the Silicon Image chipped cards are the same card. SiL3132 if I remember right.



    the express slot is good for up to 2.5 Gbit/sec, so pretty close to SATAII. Most drives don't run that fast.



    now, those cards require a driver be installed from SI, & I've had trouble with some drives causing kernel panics when plugged in. My OWC drives cause a KP jsut about everytime. FW800 works fine. also not bootable.



    my current drive is a onnto datawhale from cooldrives.com & it's OK. I run my Lightroom library from it. Transfer speed, even raid 1, is pretty good, but only a touch faster than fw800.



    Now the JMicron JMB360 chipset cards are native & bootable (core 2 models only) BUT are only 1 sata port.



    I spent $20 on mine, special buy from newegg.com - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16839200006



    BUT if you want good tech support macsales & addonics would be better, IMO.

    http://addonics.com/products/host_co...adexc34-2e.asp



    the cards with the black plastic cover like this one are all the same. the $119 cards aren't any better!



    macsales.com has some too. they have the jmicron cards as well.
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