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eSATA card recommendation?


Sponge
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My PC doesn't have any eSATA ports and having just bought an HDD dock with eSATA, I'm looking into buying a PCI card for it.

I've found a few, but this one from Maplin looks promising, what with the '2 x ESATA and 2 x SATA plus 1 x IDE ports.'

PCI-Express Dual ESATA + Dual SATA + IDE Ports : PCI-E : Maplin £24.99

Most of the other cards I'm looking at are a similar price, or higher, but with only 2 x eSATA.

Scan.co.uk: Lycom PE-102R5 Dual eSATA External Ports PCI-E Host (Raid 5,0,1,10 & JBOD) PC/MAC/Linux £17.84

Startech 2 Port PCI Express eSATA Controller Adapter Card - Storage controller - 2 Channel - SATA-300 low profile - PCI Express x1 - Ebuyer £22.12

LaCie eSATA PCI Card: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics & Photo £30.08

I'm just a little wary of buying a no-name product from Maplin. :uhoh:

Edited by Sponge
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  • 3 weeks later...

I'm still debating which of these cards to get (out of the first five). I'm getting confused by their similarities.

I'm buying in conjunction with a HDD Dock, so I can use a bare drive. It's going to be used for one of my many backups. So I guess I really only need one external eSATA port. But then I'm scuppered if I ever want another eSATA HDD in the future, so maybe I should spend the extra £6 and get a 2 port one???

Now I'm confused as to which 2 port one to get.

Anyone out there understand the blurb and can recommend one?

tia +++

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Hmmm, USB 3.

Scan.co.uk: 2 Port Scan HPU-300NC V2 SuperSpeed USB3.0 (NEC) 5Gbps PCI-Express Card

Scan.co.uk: Icy Box IB-110StU3-B Docking station for 2.5" or 3.5" SATA HDD with USB3.0 interface

Very tempting, but the dock is twice the price of an eSATA one. As I'm only going to be using it for backups, I'm not sure it's worth paying for the extra speed.

Edited by Sponge
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I'm still debating which of these cards to get (out of the first five). I'm getting confused by their similarities.

... I use the Lycom PE-102 2 Port eSATA PCI-E Controller with a 1TB hanging off each, although I often wish for another external port.

Yoyotech do a USB 3 bundle deal on the Sharkoon kit which is about the best you can get, no idea if it's cheaper than Scan tho'. ::YoYo Tech::

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Thanks for the options guys. +++

I might go with this Icy Box one, simply because it comes with a 2 year warranty and the Sharkoon only 1.

With a slightly cheaper USB 3 PCI-E card (Scan's own, rather than Sharkoon) it works out at just under £55.

Knowing my luck Scan will do a 'Today Only' offer on them the day after I place the order!

Edited by Sponge
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Well, at the last minute I changed my mind again and went with the original plan of eSATA. :Slap:

I got to thinking and came to a similar conclusion. At the moment, I can live with eSATA speeds. The eSATA dock was half the price of the USB 3 one. My laptop has eSATA already. So with a PCI-E card for my desktop, I can use the eSATA dock with both.

USB 3 is probably the future, but at the moment it's too expensive and I can wait.

So a Lycom eSATA PCI-E card and Icybox eSATA/USB2 dock is winging it's way to me now.

Thanks for all the assistance. :beer:

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The stuff arrived this morning and it's all connected and working.

The card is, well, a card. Can't really judge vfm. It's working out of the box using drivers installed by Windows 7. I opted not to use the CD. If I have any issues, then I'll probably go to the SiL website and see what's there.

The caddy is cheap and cheerful. The materials aren't top-class, but again, it works.

I'm transferring a 345gb file at the moment.

Ext HDD > USB2 > PC > eSATA > Ext HDD.

Getting 34MB/sec

I'll be trying other files when this finishes. Not from the external usb hdd though; see what speeds I get then.

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whats wrong with sticking a sata cable into your motherboard and leaving it out the back through an open backplate (along with a sata cable)?

if you dont have sata on mboard you could do that with a pci card too.

diy esata! +++

34mb/sec is dire. should have seen this post sooner would have suggested the above and told you not to worry about sata speeds as you dont have anythng which will saturate them. cost of above solution would be under a tenner including sata card.

its actually usable in a commercial environment as i do that here as all controllers have a latency overhead which isnt tolerable for large transfers. not had any problems with connectors wearing out even when things plugged in/out daily.

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Direct from the PC to the eSATA drive I just got 55MB/sec. :confused:

Two transfers at the same time, I get: 1 @ 50MB/sec and 1 @ 42MB/sec

Three transfers at the same time, I get: 2 @ 41MB/sec and 1 @ 17MB/sec

I've just set in motion the transfer of a folder with >100gb of HDV footage. So the files are all quite large. I'm now getting 100MB/sec.

Edited by Sponge
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