2PORT Tempo Sata EXPRESS34 Controller Esata Port Mac Win

List Price: $196.09 Discount Price: $80.24

Features:

• Two eSATA ports
• 3 Gb/s per SATA II controller port
• FIS-based Port Multiplier-aware to support up to 10 disk drives
• Bus Interface ExpressCard/34
• External Connectors - Two eSATA

Customer Reviews:

Unbelievable performance [Posted on 2007-10-18]
Rarely do compute gizmo's give anything close to "theoretical" perfomance. THIS DID.

I needed to migrate 35Gb of video and assets from a MacBookPro internal Seagate 200Gb/7200 SATA drive to an external Seagate 750Gb/7200 eSATA drive in a Fusion 500P hot swap (unRAIDED) drive cage via a multiport connection. It worked flawlessly and ... did I mention the performance? I was getting so darn close to the 300Mb/sec that it was irrelevant timing. Awesome for laptop external storage solution!!!

Works as promised, but nothing extra [Posted on 2007-11-29]
Bought this card to use with my Macbook Pro to see if I could wring any more performance out of my drives using eSATA rather than Firewire800. Target device was a Lacie Quadra d500. Performance was slightly improved in sequential performance, but close to nothing in random reads and/or writes, which is more typical of average usage.

Drivers work fine in both Leopard and Tiger, but the continuously running background monitoring program is a little klunky in terms of design; why run if the card isn't present ? Also, the card doesn't come with a carry case, making storage when not in use difficult - I ended up hacking the original packaging and using that.

In summary, the card delivers what it says - eSATA connectivity via ExpressCard34. Is it significantly faster than Firewire 800 ? Not on a 7200RPM 2.5" drive, or a 10000RPM 3.5" drive, no, it isn't.

Buy this card if you don't have Firewire800 and/or you want to ensure that you can always connect to storage.

For the price, I honestly expected more.

Works w/ Leopard and Lacie d2 Quadra [Posted on 2008-01-02]
Haven't had much time to check speed, but seems to be one of the only cards out right now that will support a Lacie drive on Leopard 10.5.1 Good luck

Finder hangs under Tiger and Leopard with port multipler enclosures [Posted on 2008-05-10]
I originally bought this with the Sonnet Fusion 500P 5BAY Sata Enclosure back in July 2007. Doing file copies between a single drive and a two-disk raid 0 in the Fusion 500P bay would result in consistent finder hangs, requiring hard reboot. I also managed to hang finder copies using transfers between two disks. This was with a 2007 Macbook Pro 2.4GHz running Tiger. The espress34 card seemed to work ok with a two disk enclosure (Firmtek SeriTek/1EN2 and SeriTek/2EN2). I returned the Fusion 500P and used the espress34 card with my dual bay enclosures.

The last few months I have been using the card with the Firmtek SeriTek/5PM. This seemed to be ok unless I was doing parallel finder copies, in which case it would hang again. Then I obtained a new Samsung 1T drive (the disk enclosure contains WD 1T drives, Samsung 500/250 drives and Seagate 750G drives). Doing a disk copy between any drive and the new Samsung would result in the usual finder hang, requiring a hard reboot. Doing copies between data on the five bay enclosure and a two bay enclosure containing the Samsung disk worked perfectly. Again, this was with the Macbook Pro running Tiger. So, I decided to upgrade to Leopard 10.5.2; same problem, hang, when copying between drives on the five bay enclosure. The driver is the "latest" one from the Sonnet website (dated 3/6/2007, v1.1.9).

Hence, this card is not reliable when using port multiplier enclosures.

I would not recommended this card for use in port multipler enclosures.

2 Port Tempo Sata Express34 Card [Posted on 2008-08-12]
Highly recommended!
I have a Asus F3Sv-x1 laptop which I used this card for. I (without checking) thought I needed an express34 card but in reality this laptop supports an express34 and express54. The sata card is fast. It leaves usb 2.0/firewire in the dust. I was shocked out fast files/folders were copied from external HD to laptop via expresscard. highly recommend for copying large files.
This device supports my mac as well (double bonus).
Con - expensive.
Pro - supports high transfer speeds; supports both mac/pc

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