CalDigit eSATA Card Vs. Others

[Gary Adcock]

I have use esata and FW Xpress cards from Sonnet with great success since the PCMCIA slot was abandoned.

The only real issue I have heard about any esata card, was a software issue with Silicon Image (SII) cards needing to have a firmware upgrade for Leopard (10.5) that I believe is now fixed.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows

Inside look at the IoHD

[Michael Sacci]

Don’t know about the CalD card but the Sonnet is a mulitport so you can hook up 5 drives per port. The speed is bottlenecked by the card/bus so it is not like running a 5 drive array on a desktop but it is an option that I needed to take advantage of a couple of times.

[Jeff Mack]

I have both and I do not see any difference in operating my 4 disk raid 0 with either card. I do have 5 raids though and it sure is convenient to have two plugged in at a time when media managing my space!

Jeff

[Jon Schilling]

The FASTA-1ex card was designed with only 1 port. Other manufactures may have two ports on their express card, but that causes problems when plugging in another cable when one is connected, the card will want to eject. This unwanted action really defeats the purpose of having 2 ports on the card. Additionally there is no speed advantage to a 2 port card, the eSATA ExpressCard itself is only capable of 100MB/s max, having 2 ports really doesn’t give you any advantage over a 1 port card. Our FASTA-1ex card supports port multiplied storage products.

Jon Schilling | Director of Business Development
CalDigit Inc
phone 714-572-9889 X234
fax 714-572-9881
web http://www.caldigit.com
email jons@caldigit.com
skype cgijon
office 1941 Miraloma Ave. #B Placentia, CA 92870

[Jeff Mack]

“having 2 ports really doesn’t give you any advantage over a 1 port card.”

The advantage it gives is if you need two raids for storage. If you connect them both, you have an advantage of constantly having to swich cables, which by the way – you are right, if you don’t hold the card while inserting the cable, you can eject the card.

Working with Pro Res, you know the file sizes are large. I work with multicam multiclips and it really makes it handy having two ports to export to a second raid.

Don’t get me wrong here, Cal Digit is great and has a quality reputation but I think you missed it by not having two or more ports on your card. I wish there was a card made with 4-5 ports just for convenience.

Jeff