Belkin SATA II ExpressCard Review Discussion

Thanks to high transfer speeds and compatibility eSATA devices are quickly becoming the the solution for our ever increasing need for storage. Take a look at our in-depth review to see if the Belkin SATA II ExpressCard adapter is the data storage solution of your dreams.

Read the full content of this Article: Belkin SATA II ExpressCard Review

 

I would be curious to see how this stacks up against an external FW400 enclosure. Those enclosures are fairly cheap (<$50).

Great write-up, it's good to see options like this emerging!

 

FW400 speeds around around 20-22MB/s (what my mac mini would peg out at). CPU usage was on the lower side, but speeds were pretty bad, under USB2

 

it seems wider than a standard expresscard. does it fit in a regular expresscard slot or does it need a pc card size slot?

 

Well, there are 2 different expresscard sizes. This is the wider 54mm version.

 

And this is the standard express-card size. They both are standard. Anyways, nice to see an express-card review. A few question though: How the hell did you get your USB 2.0 to be so constant? What drives/enclosures and HDDs did you use? And can you use 2 esata drives at full speed?

 

Thanks Kevin!

I wonder why it's so expensive...I think 35$ is a reasonable price point.

 

USB2 has always been consistent in the external enclosures I have used. I believe for the USB2 example I used a Vantec enclosure that I am going to be posting a review on in the next few days. I have another one that provides basically the exact same consistent speed.

Regarding the 2 drives at the same time, the 2 first benchmark screenshots were of a 120gb fujitsu sata drive and 320gb seagate sata drive running at the same time, full speed (one was 3.0gbs, other was 1.5), and cpu usage was minimal.

Well, I see it dropping down eventually. Right now I think it is the worth its price point, since it is a bit more advanced than a USB, FireWire, or LAN card.

 

But Kevin - look at this - it's just one of a dozen like it from no-name brands at over 50% cheaper than the Belkin

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16839228001

 

Well I guess it comes down to chipset they use and overall quality. If its the same, then go for the lowest price. Just know that a certain someone has been running a 50% off coupon for ages

 

OK, cool. .

 

Very nice benchmarks! I've been on the fence about getting one of these things (I only have a PCMCIA port), but seeing these benchmarks...I'm ordering one today. I'll post a review of the PCMCIA version as well...

 

You should be seeing pretty similar speeds, but a top limit around 45-50 with the PCI bus limitation. If I can find a PCMCIA one cheap enough I will probably get one for my older laptops to make backups easier.

 

Is $27 low enough for you?

 

Cant find it at the moment, but I swear there was one in the 30 range that gave you a card with an enclosure.



EDIT: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817348023

There it is

 

Yeah, but in my case I already have enclosures for all my drives, and this is a few bucks cheaper

 

More cant hurt. If its anything like the OKGEAR eSata enclosure I have, it may have both SATA and IDE connections inside of it. Kinda strange, as the IDE part onto works through USB2, but it wasnt advertised.

 

Doesn't the EC PCI bus speed end up being something astronomical (in theory, obviously) like 4GB/sec, while PCMCIA is limited to the USB2.0 bus speed of a bit over ~480Mbps?

So in theory, a PCMCIA eSATA card must be slower than a EC version of the same thing?

 

That looks like a 2.5" enclosure...you might be able to fit both interfaces in it...but I'd think that'd be difficult.

 

We've had this discussion before I think

USB - about 60MB/s theoretical max (480Mbps)
PCMCIA - about 132MB/s theoretical max (1066Mbps)
ExpressCard - about 312.5MB/s theoretical max (2500Mbps)

EC only uses one PCIe lane, so it is limited...but the max is far more than any other laptop slot around.

 

I think it's because we DID have this discussion in the past that I am confused why some of us ( not you or me) are confused about this. You just proved my point, once again.

 

This claim is spurious. FW400 is known to be faster than USB 2.0. Furthermore, this review is pretty poor. Why are you even bothering to compare SATA to USB 2.0? USB 2.0 has been around for years, and everyone knows it's not fast. Also, there is no comparison between FW800 and ESATA, which are the only external drive interfaces that are comparable.

Tom's Hardware ran tests that compare USB 2.0, FW400, FW800, and ESATA:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/12/05/storage-with-style/page6.html#data_transfer_performance

 

I am just reporting what my old mac mini would get. On my old WD 250gb mybook the FW400 would always be slower than USB2. While firewire did have much lower processor activity, it wasnt going faster than USB2 in OSX or Win XP through bootcamp.

There are are no FW800 tests for a few reasons:

A. I have no FW800 devices, controllers nor enclosures
B. compared to USB or eSata, it is on barely anything
C. It was not the key item on this review, this was about eSata

Also, USB2 was picked as the comparison because most people may not realize how much slower it is compared to the new interfaces. eSata is cropping up on almost everything these days, and its a review on its capabilities. While FW400 is seen on more items these days, eSata blows FW800 out of the water in device integration. When it only requires an adapter for regular SATA ports, almost every computer on the market has eSata in some form. Hard to say the same about FW800.

EDIT: That Tom's Hardware list is pretty outdated as it doesnt even look at the newer eSata drives on the market. My plain Seagate 7200.10 drive going through eSata is 2 MB/s from being at the top of that list with 75MB/s, a far cry from their eSata comparison barely pushing 60MB/s. The faster 7200 rpm LAPTOP drives are benchmarking faster than that drive these days.

 

I would love to see a comparison between PCMCIA SATA adapter and this ExpressCard SATA adapter. The read/write speed for mainstream hard drives right now is around 40-80MByte/s, if a PCMCIA card can perform at 60% of its theoretical max speed, it should not be the bottleneck for most of the hard drives. We all know that the PCMCIA cards are at least 50% cheaper right now.
I guess it all depends on how fast is the PCMCIA card in real world.

 

Well than wait 7-10 days, and I'll have the review ready! My PCMCIA card should ship today...

 

Cool! I am looking forward to that review.

 

Cool, me as well (although I don't really have PCMCIA...)

 

Which chipset is the card using?

 

Will this card be able to power an external 5400/7200rpm 2.5" hard drive without an extra AC adapter? Would it depend on the hard drive's enclosure? I know that most external 2.5" drives that go through USB require a "Y" cable that connects to two USB ports to draw sufficient power.

 

From testing so far, in all situations the device still needed an additional power source.

 

eSata does not provide power at all. So you'll be needing a power source.

 

Is eSata hot swapable?

I read something about the external drive having to be powered on before you boot, and that you can't disconnect and reconnect like USB or Firewire.

I can't believe that is right...can anyone verify?

Thanks.

 

Take a look at the Vantec PCMCIA card reviewed here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=144343
note performance on the ST 320 drive, much improved with the EC card.

 

For the past few weeks I've been trying to research any reviews and experiences with various PCMCIA Cardbus e-sata cards. I have an Asus G1 so I'm stuck with PCMCIA (unfortunately), usb2, or firewire 400.

So far, the best potential card seems to be this one by Firmtek:
http://firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-1sm2/

There is a powerbook review using this cardbus card here:

Barefeats review of firmtek e-sata cardbus card

In the review above the reviewer posted ~ 100 MB/s sustained Reads/Writes through the aforementionoed PCMCIA Cardbus E-sata card. Granted this is using a RAID 0 enclosure it shows that the cardbus interface might not actually be a bottleneck if implemented efficiently in the card.

For single drive performance it averaged around 50-60 MB/s.

Another review by this same site using a more generic Cardbus Card (no longer available) posted speeds of 60MB/s sustained read and 70MB/s sustained write using a single sata drive through a cardbus e-sata card!

Barefeats Cardbus Sata on Powerbook G4 review

It shouldn't have anything to do with it being a powerbook right? I would think that the chipset in the Asus G1 would be able to handle this workload anyways.

I'm very impressed with these cards when compared to the other brands I've seen reviewed here: Tom's Hardware Addonics Cardbus Adapter Review (seems to have a bottleneck in write speed)

Notebookreview.com Vantec Cardbus review (45-50 MB/s averages).

The only downside is the pricetag: $90 for the firmtek card

I recently purchased a cheap Syba e-sata cardbus card that had downright pathetic performance (10 MB/s !!). I used a 7200 WD 250GB sata harddrive in a vantec e-sata enclosure which got good reviews so I'm pretty sure it isn't at fault (the usb goes at a brisk 20-30 MB/s). I guess you get what you pay for sometimes.

So i'm willing to shell out the dough if it's really going to give me 50-60 MB/s read writes, but I really wish I could figure out why many of the other cards are doing so poorely compared to this more expensive card.

Any thoughts/experiences/advice would be greatly appreciated .