StarTech ECESATA22 2 Port ExpressCard eSATA Controller Adapter Card

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.

Pros: It works just like they said that it would and I am pleased. I coupled it with the StarTech esata dock SATADOCKU2E. My first StarTech purchase but not my last. My system is VISTA.

Cons: none

Pros: Small and light. Twice as fast as USB interface to same drives.

Cons: Card slips out of the slot very easily. Can ruin your day by falling out in the middle of a massive backup operation. Not a full SATA controller. Appears in "SCSI and RAID controllers", so you can't use ATA features. You can't set your drive's spindown and power saving mode, can't set or enter its password, can't command security erase, can't read drives' temperature, SMART (pre-fail warnings, load/unload count), or set acoustic management mode. This means you can't stop the drive from unloading its heads frequently or spinning down whenever it's been idle a short time and wearing itself out, unless you plug the drive into another (full SATA) controller and change the drive's settings there. WORST OF ALL, you cannot cleanly unmount the drives. Selecting "Safely Remove Hardware" unmounts and spins down the drives, then immediately spins them back up and re-mounts them. You can hot-unplug the drives, but this leaves the filesystems unclean, so they may have to be repaired.

Overall Review: Make sure you choose "Optimize for quick removal". This normally sacrifices a lot of performance, but otherwise you'll lose data or corrupt the drive because of a corrupted journal. NTFS seems to have less of a risk of this, but if you're using Linux with ext3 or ext4, you'll really need to set write barriers on if you use write caching, to avoid severe filesystem corruption from a corrupted journal. Unfortunately, enabling write barriers take performance down quite a bit. Thanks to Newegg, this is being returned, and I'm currently evaluating other controllers. Why go SATA unless you can use its features? But controllers that present themselves as SCSI controllers dumb the drives down to just the basic functionality. Fast, but all the advanced features cannot be used. Not suitable for self-encrypting drives -- you cannot set or enter the password, cannot retask the drive, etc. If you've spend big $$$ on a good drive, get a real SATA controller.

Pros: Works like a charm. Just slips right into my expansion slot. Load some drivers and its good to go. Speed is way better than USB and Firewire.

Cons: Only thing I don't like about the expansion slot is that the device doesn't "Lock" into place, easy to just bump it and slide it out. Not really much of a con because the device WORKS!

Overall Review: Esata or go home!

Pros: It works just like they said I was able to connect my Rosewill RSV-S8 to my laptop it reads all 10TB of HD space on it : )

Cons: none

Pros: Extremely fast, easy install on Windows 7. Port multiplier feature lets me use three 1TB drives in an enclosure with a single eSATA connection.

Cons: Tip: Do NOT get the ECESAT32 6 Gbps model from StarTech. That one uses a Marvell chip. I had repeated driver hangs that caused file corruption. This ECESATA22 model uses a Siliconix chip and is solid.

Pros: Simple pnp with great transfer speeds.

Cons: none

Overall Review: Does not snap in, but if you have additional sata drives connected laptop and card should not be moving anyways.

Pros: It fits. Works somewhat.

Cons: Errors towards end of formatting a 320GB drive. Same drive in same enclosure formats fine using USB2, suggests problem is in this eSATA controller.

Overall Review: Disappointed.