I'm looking into buying a refurbed macbook pro. I noticed the new ones do not have the ExpressCard slot. Does anyone have experience using an ExpressCard for eSATA enclosures? I suppose I could buy a new enclosure that supports firewire, but I already have one with USB2 and eSATA. It depends whether the enclosure or the ExpressCard works out to be cheaper, or more reliable.
macbook + ExpressCard for eSATA?
- Thread starter Scott_Arm
- Start date
As far as I know, the only new Mac Book Pro that has an express card 34 slot is the brand new 17" model, but i'm not sure about the older models.
If you get a MBP with an expresscard/34 slot, definitely go with an eSATA card for the external hard drive.
Last December I picked up a 2 port Dynex eSATA-II express card adapter for my Dell XPS m1530 (which is pretty much a Mac Book Pro hardware wise) @ Best Buy with a gift card I was given and it works great in both Windows 7 and Mac OS 10 Leopard. My external hard drives running eSATA are far faster than when I use the USB 2.0 port.
Here is the one I have. I paid $29.99 for it so it's definitely less expensive as some of the other brands like SIIG (which I highly recommend)
http://www.dynexproducts.com/pc-687-7-dynex-2-port-esata-ii-expresscard-adapter.aspx
Newegg's most popular card is a Rosewill and costs $29.99 and is on sale. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16839200006
I haven't seen a comparison online showing performance differences between these ~$30 cards and ones like the SIIG SC-SAEE22-S1 which costs $69.99, but from my experience with SIIG's products, they're definitely top notch in quality.
If you get a MBP with an expresscard/34 slot, definitely go with an eSATA card for the external hard drive.
Last December I picked up a 2 port Dynex eSATA-II express card adapter for my Dell XPS m1530 (which is pretty much a Mac Book Pro hardware wise) @ Best Buy with a gift card I was given and it works great in both Windows 7 and Mac OS 10 Leopard. My external hard drives running eSATA are far faster than when I use the USB 2.0 port.
Here is the one I have. I paid $29.99 for it so it's definitely less expensive as some of the other brands like SIIG (which I highly recommend)
http://www.dynexproducts.com/pc-687-7-dynex-2-port-esata-ii-expresscard-adapter.aspx
Newegg's most popular card is a Rosewill and costs $29.99 and is on sale. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16839200006
I haven't seen a comparison online showing performance differences between these ~$30 cards and ones like the SIIG SC-SAEE22-S1 which costs $69.99, but from my experience with SIIG's products, they're definitely top notch in quality.
Oh, and all the Macbook Pros up until the ones that were just announced had an ExpressCard/34 slot. The 17" still has the ExpressCard slot, but the other models have replaced it with an SD card slot. I guess it was a way of reducing cost?
For those looking at buying a new macbook, also not that for some reason they have dropped from SATA 3.0Gbit/s to SATA 1.5Gbit/s. I'm not sure why they would do this, but if you're using multiple drives or external devices, or a solid state drive, you could saturate the SATA bus.
I bought a refurb 15" with the ExpressCard slot and the 3.0Gbit/s SATA link. I'll most definitely go with an eSATA ExpressCard adapter.
For those looking at buying a new macbook, also not that for some reason they have dropped from SATA 3.0Gbit/s to SATA 1.5Gbit/s. I'm not sure why they would do this, but if you're using multiple drives or external devices, or a solid state drive, you could saturate the SATA bus.
I bought a refurb 15" with the ExpressCard slot and the 3.0Gbit/s SATA link. I'll most definitely go with an eSATA ExpressCard adapter.
Mine probably will too. The macbook refurb I bought has a 5400rpm drive. My external drive is a 7200.11 drive with a 32MB cache buffer. I'm guessing it will be faster than the internal.
The big thing I need to figure out is a partitioning scheme for that drive, and how I'll use it for both storage and backups. I'd like to have a spot for Time Machine crap, a spot for dumping music/videos/files of my choosing, and maybe a FAT32 partition to be used for both Windows and OSX.
Why those sizes?
The Macbook has a 320GB drive, and my external drive is 1TB. I'll probably use Boot Camp to throw Windows7 or something on this thing. I'd like to take advantage of OSX Time Machine, and actually do backups.
I was thinking a 220GB partition for OSX, a 100GB partition for Windows on the main drive. Then on the external have something like 300GB for Time Machine and then the rest I'm not sure.
The laptop has 4gigs of RAM, a Core2 Duo 2.53GHz and the 9600M GT with 512MB of video memory. It'll probably be good for Source games and some older stuff like Company of Heroes (which I never played). Hopefully Diablo3 will run reasonably well. Otherwise, I won't be doing much gaming on it, so I don't know about making a huge partition for games and game content.
Blazkowicz
Legend
Games are data, they don't require special thinking, I have documents, games, movies, anime manga etc. on a data partition.
a huge FAT32 partition might not be very safe, and annoying (on such a huge hdd you might end up storing > 4GB files afterall)
Look into file system options : an ext2 partition should be accessible from mac OS, and from windows after install an ext2 driver. Ntfs-3g might work under mac OS and thus allow full read-write access.
I've just heard of MacDrive which looks to be a HFS+ driver for windows, claims Time Machine compatibility in its current RC; but it's commercial software that has to be bought
http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive8/
The internal drive could be set your way. Or why not a 20GB or 30GB mac OS partition, a 30GB win7 partition, and a data partition (ext2, ntfs or hfs+) for the rest.
Time Machine is not required for backups, you could have an OS agnostic solution like rsync, Windows also have something similar to Time Machine, called Volume Shadow Copy ; you also can do images of OS partitions.
So we have to decide which way is the simplest
. I don't mean to be confusing but I am.
External drive I don't know. Either you do Time Machine (requires hfs+) and storage, or just a big pool of storage (separated maybe as 100GB + 900GB or whatever so you keep the option of destroying that 100GB partition, making it fat32 would you need to (compatible with consumer electronics), cut it further in pieces and install an OS or whatever - knoppix partition, etc.
a huge FAT32 partition might not be very safe, and annoying (on such a huge hdd you might end up storing > 4GB files afterall)
Look into file system options : an ext2 partition should be accessible from mac OS, and from windows after install an ext2 driver. Ntfs-3g might work under mac OS and thus allow full read-write access.
I've just heard of MacDrive which looks to be a HFS+ driver for windows, claims Time Machine compatibility in its current RC; but it's commercial software that has to be bought
http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive8/
The internal drive could be set your way. Or why not a 20GB or 30GB mac OS partition, a 30GB win7 partition, and a data partition (ext2, ntfs or hfs+) for the rest.
Time Machine is not required for backups, you could have an OS agnostic solution like rsync, Windows also have something similar to Time Machine, called Volume Shadow Copy ; you also can do images of OS partitions.
So we have to decide which way is the simplest
. I don't mean to be confusing but I am.External drive I don't know. Either you do Time Machine (requires hfs+) and storage, or just a big pool of storage (separated maybe as 100GB + 900GB or whatever so you keep the option of destroying that 100GB partition, making it fat32 would you need to (compatible with consumer electronics), cut it further in pieces and install an OS or whatever - knoppix partition, etc.
Last edited by a moderator:
Got my mac. Went with a simple setup. On the external drive I have 600 gigs of HFS, or whatever it is, for my Time Machine backups and whatever else I want to store. OSX is where I'll be playing music and movies. Then I have the remainer of the terrabyte for an ntfs partition, where I can store games and whatnot for use with my Windows dual boot.
I haven't actually setup the boot camp thing yet. I need to get another copy of Windows to use. Then I'm going to setup Parallels in OSX with the virtual machine running off the boot camp partition.
I haven't actually setup the boot camp thing yet. I need to get another copy of Windows to use. Then I'm going to setup Parallels in OSX with the virtual machine running off the boot camp partition.