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PCMCIA SATA

O

obsidian_mh

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 26, 2005
Messages
464
I'm looking to buy a PCMCIA eSATA card to expand my laptop's storage space.

Does anyone have any experience with these? Is the speed better than connecting a USB 2.0 drive? I'm mainly planning to run applications (and possibly games) off of it. I should get ATA-133 speeds from it, right?
 
Hi,

I think you are talking about CardBus SATA adapters. I did some experiments a very long time ago:
http://www.hjreggel.net/hardware/CardBus_S-ATA.html

Short summary: Read rates were excellent, should be up to 85MB/s (had no harddisk with such a sustained data rate). But the write rate was disappointing, depending on the Notebook 17-20MB/s. Read also depends on the architecture, but the lowest rate was 40MB/s, which is still above USB 2.0 performance.

But why not get a decent internal disk?

Hans-Jürgen
 
I've got an 80GB right now. I don't really care to invest over $100 in an HD.

I also have an external 200GB and external 60GB... just that they're USB2.0/ FW400. I've also got plenty of storage over my home network.

The issue comes up when I have XP (school) / Vista Beta (software testing) / Gentoo Linux (primary) all installed on an 80GB HD. They play fairly nicely with each other, but when you're a LAN-goer, you need the extra space. I already use my 200GB for music from LANs, and I can't run games off a USB2.0 HD.

With those read speads, games and applications should both run fine from an eSATA card. Not to mention that your reviews were done in late 2004. Have you look at any current models? They could have been improved.

Thanks for the awesome review!
 
Hi,

I only have those two cards from two years ago. But I doubt that there was much going on, because there is not a big market for non-mainstream CardBus add-on cards. As you can see from the figures I gave, there can be much difference between different Notebooks, so there might not be much to optimize in the card.

But nowadays, it's much easier to find those cards, and they are cheaper. You should be able to get a dual port card for about $30-40.

Hans-Jürgen
 
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