Quote:
Originally Posted by DigiTechSupt
Is there a reason you want to go e-sata for the external drive, rather than firewire, other than the possible speed advantage (which really isn't much since you're still limited by the drive throughput..)?
I can only speak from some very brief testing I did with an esata card - it seemed to work fine, but the session was very small and not many plug-ins. I ended up switching to a FW400 expresscard shortly afterward, so the esata card got no real testing.
Keep in mind that this is my own personal experience - Digidesign doesn't recommend or qualify e-sata cards or drives at this point.
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I believe reason why you would want to use an eSATA card is because it will allow the best throughput on the expresscard slot. You cannot effectively use a FW hard drive on an MBP, since both the FW 400 port and the FW 800 port are on the same FW bus. So, when the FW 400 port is running, the FW 800 port is forced to run at 400 speeds. I don't particularly like the idea of running both devices off of the same bus, it's just asking for trouble in my opinion. It'd be exactly like daisy chaining for an extended period of time, which doesn't seem like a stable solution.
Why would a FW expresscard be any better or worse than an eSATA expresscard? They both end up sending data through the expresscard, so in essence, they would not behave like either eSATA or FW, but rather like a PCI express. Is this correct, or am I totally wrong in this assumption?