This wasn't going to be a review, because I basically hate this product, well, at least I did until last night when I finally got it to work.
I've owned this card for at least a year, I've never gotten it to work with the two Vantec Nextar3 enclosures I have (USB and eSata combo).
Background info:
Macbook Pro & HP 6730b (both have expresscard slot)
2x
Vantec Nextar3 3.5" sata enclosures with 500GB WD drives inside
Apiotek Expresscard eSata 0003D (2 port)
Product Details:
This eSata Expresscard has 2 ports, and can do RAID 0, 1, and software 5 (with a port multiplier). It's based on the Silicon Image SiI3132 chipset which has mixed reviews across the place.
Out of the box it has the 'base' firmware, for non-RAID, however you can flash it with the RAID firmware if you desire which I will be attempting sometime soon to see if I can get more performance out of a RAID 0 (striped) configuration with the two 500GB drives.
The goal is to use these disk's for a scratch disk when editing video.
The low down:
The card always seemed to appear on the machine, just nothing worked if I plugged the drives in. This drove me mad for ages. It didn't even work on a windows machine properly.
Recently I did some more research after being absolutely pissed at the crap performance of USB. I found an forum post where someone had a similar problem and what they did to fix it is set a jumper on the actual hard disk's (pin 5/6) to force them to 150Mb/s mode. (SATA I) I have it a go, it worked, damn!
So now I've got this rig working, although with the drives set to support "SATA I" only. I'm not sure if it's a limitation of the oxford chipset in the Vantec external hard disk cases or the eSata cable's I'm using, or...
Vantec (their site) claims the enclosures support SATA II drives without a problem. Hrmmm.
Anyway, here's the bit you really want to see:
Performance:
Internal 5200RPM Macbook Pro hard disk speed:
External eSata 500GB 7200RPM drive limited to 150Mb/s:
Conclusion:
The expresscard and external drive absolutely smashes the performance of the internal disk. Kills it. And it's not even full speed, I've limited these babies to the 150Mb/s option. Imagine this working at actual SATA II speeds?
When I've finally built my NAS and moved the crap off these drives, I'll set this config up in RAID 0 and report back with my findings.. booyah.
