First Serial ATA ExpressCard adapter ships

It's looks good - very inter ....

very interested theme; I will back, thanks!

More relavant benchmarks.
http://www.barefeats.com/hard70.html

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The real question is: Can today's hardrives sustain that kind of read/write speed? If not, what's the point?