Filed under: Accessories, Audio, Hardware, Macbook Pro
First Serial ATA ExpressCard adapter ships
Ben Drawbaugh from HD Beat dropped us a line on the first Serial ATA ExpressCard adapter shipping from FirmTek. If you've been lamenting the 15" MacBook Pro's lack of a FireWire 800 port and/or haven't heard of these external Serial ATA adapters, check this out: these ExpressCard adapter bus speeds make FW800 look like a Parallel port. The Serial ATA standard in these adapters can reach transfer speeds of 1.5 Gbps (SATA-I) and 3.0 Gbps (SATA-II). Perfect for video and audio editing professionals, and reasonably priced: this adapter has a street price of around $119.95, which isn't much more than the FW800 ExpressCard adapters I've seen going for around $100. The price of the drive enclosure, however, is the only part of this setup that might sting a little: a bundle of the card and a drive enclosure is $309.95. Still a small price to pay for making mince meat out of FireWire 800.[via MacMegasite]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jonathan Allen said 3:29PM on 6-11-2006
Holy Sweetness!
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randy said 3:54PM on 6-11-2006
The real question is: Can today's hardrives sustain that kind of read/write speed? If not, what's the point?
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Ultim8Fury said 3:58PM on 6-11-2006
That's all well and good but when then drive you connect to is physically limited to 30-50MB/s because it's a hard disk. What's the point ?
In my experience, video editing consists of large files so sustained transfer is far more important than burst speed to and from cache. That being the case you aren't interface limited by USB2 or FireWire 400.
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Malfoy Roark said 4:46PM on 6-11-2006
RE:1 and 2
Ok, so whats the better idea here: Limit the expresscard to the speed of the fastest drive and hope drives don't come out that are faster OR make the expresscard as fast as it can so other hard drives can grow into it?
There is only right answer.
With the inevitable arrival of cheap large flash drives, this technology will inevitably have a great use.
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Ultim8Fury said 5:56PM on 6-11-2006
Eventually, sure. But from a standpoint today. There are enough other external interfaces that have the headroom to cope with drives for at least the next few years. Even when you look at the new hybrid flash/drives from samsung. FireWire400 and USB 2.0 are ample for todays drives. FireWire 800 has enough headroom for years to come.
With the exception of Wan interfaces I can't think of a single thing I need the Expresscard slot for on my MBP.
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Jonathan said 12:53AM on 6-12-2006
External RAID anyone? Thats what I plan on doing with my MBP, so if I feel bottlenecked by the Firewire 400, I'll just pop in one of these.
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keihan said 3:13AM on 6-12-2006
Hey, if you do RAID, you can achieve faster speeds than 30-50MB/s that's mentioned above. A fast -interface- is not a bad thing just because the media isn't as fast just yet.
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Macster said 11:19AM on 6-12-2006
First off, it isn't the first Express Card Serial ATA card, as I have one sitting in front of me. Second, SATA drive enclosures are not expensive, the last 2 I bought were about 40 bucks, which is the same price as a Firewire 400 one of the same quality.
And lastly, FireWire 400 is hardly fast enough for an ATA or SATA 3.5" drive. Just because the limit of the SATA interface isn't reached by the current SATA drives out there, doesn't mean that the current ATA/SATA drives don't surpass the limit of Firewire 400.
An external SATA drive runs at exactly the same speed as an internal SATA drive, which is great. It means you can take your computer and run all external drives and have no performance hit. Firewire 800 is also fast enough to have no performance hit, so it is a good option also. The reason I like SATA is it is much more common than FireWire 800.
Here is the first benchmark that came up when I googled for it, comparing Firewire 400 to USB 1/2 to ATA (which should be about the same speeds as SATA for current drives). http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=diskinterfaces&page=6
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Ben Drawbaugh said 1:38PM on 6-12-2006
More relavant benchmarks.
http://www.barefeats.com/hard70.html
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tworzenie stron said 2:21PM on 7-23-2006
very interested theme; I will back, thanks!
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Agroturystyka said 5:49AM on 8-26-2006
It's looks good - very inter ....
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