Pros: I bought a combo USB/eSATA external drive for backups of my laptop, thought I would try over USB first rather than spend money on eSATA gear right away. USB worked okay but life's too short-- 12 hours to back up my hard drive over it! Bought this card and a cable, hooked up without a hitch, same backup now runs in under 2 hours. Well worth the modest price!

Cons: Sometimes I have trouble safe-removing the drives and/or card but since this is a laptop it's not a big deal to me to shut it down. Not taking off an egg here for that because I'm not sure where the fault lies.