2PORT RAID5 Esata Pci 3GBPS External Express Card
Thursday, September 11, 2008 11:48
Binding : Electronics
ProductGroup : CE
Manufacturer : IOGEAR
Brand : Iogear
Label : IOGEAR
Publisher : IOGEAR
Model : GICE702S3R5W6
Studio : IOGEAR
- Host Interface: PCI Express
- Data Transfer Rate: Up to 300MBps
- RAID Levels: JBOD/10/5/1/0
- Ports: 2 x 7-pin Serial ATA/300 - External SATA
- Form Factor: Low-profile Plug-in Card
Iogear eSATA RAID5 3Gbps External 2-port PCI-Express Card The IOGEAR eSATA RAID5 eSATA 3Gbps External 2-port PCI-Express Card adds 2 external SATA ports to your desktop computer. It is great for users whowant to add SATA connectivity to their computers but do not want to buy a whole new computer. Devices commonly used with this host adapter are hard drives, Blu-ray optical drives HD-DVD drives, mediacenter drives and more . The low profile design of this adapter makes it ideal for computers that have limited internal expansion space. The IOGEAR eSATA RAID5 eSATA 3Gbps External 2-port PCI-Express Card also supports multiple RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Drives) configurations. RAID can be designed to provide increased data reliability or increased I/O performance, or both. The card supports RAID 5, 0, 1, 10 & JBOD setups. This card is designed to work on the high-bandwidth PCI-Express interface, effectively quadrupling the amount of available computing bandwidth over the traditional PCI interface. IOGEAR'S PCI-Express SATA Cards support all Serial ATA features, including 3.0Gbps SATA transfer speeds, Native Command Queuing,port multipliers with FIS-based switching, programmable output signal swing strengths for longer external cables or extended backplanes, hot plugging, enclosure management and ATAPI device support. Features: * 48 bits LBA Break Capacity -limit to Support HDD larger than 137GB eSATA transfers rate of 3.0Gbps * Fully compliant with Serial ATA 1.0 Specifications * Supports two independent Serial ATA Channels * Independent Link, Transport and data FIFO * Independent Command, fetch, scatter/gather, and command execution * Supports Legacy Command Queuing (LCQ) * Supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) * Supports Non-zero offsets NCQ * Supports Out of order data delivery NCQ * Supports FIS -based switching withPort Multipliers * 31 Commands and Scatter/Gather Tables per Port
Great eSATA Card for my Dell (2008-07-11)
First I must say that this is the first time that I took the time to type a review, & I buy A LOT of products.
I too saw all the negative reviews for this eSATA card. Then I saw one good review. The one good review was given by someone with the same technical circumstances as me, i.e. a Dell PowerEdge (840) server that wished to attach a Western Digital MyBook. This eSATA card just plugged in & the driver install was a snap. I saw reviews where people complain that the card did not work in their available slots, the documentation is weak, etc. After my positive experience my opinion of these people is they should have done their research before their purchase to determine the expansion slot requirements for this card & not give a negative review of the product just because they failed to do their homework to determine whether or not their specific computing platform had the correct type of slot available. Regarding the driver, there is no need for any documentation. It was that simple on my Windows XP platform.
Copying speeds.... I performed a side by side test USB 2.0 versus eSATA, all other hardware & software components being identical. Here are the results
Copied 6.59 GB of MP3 files, 1,148 files in all.
USB = 9 minutes 45 seconds
eSATA = 4 minutes, 6 seconds
The eSATA 2.4 times or 140% fasted than USB 2.0
Great for limited space, low profile cases! (2008-06-23)
I needed a half height esata pcie card to handle a couple 1TB external drives I have. After looking around i finally decided on this one and it meets all my expectations.
The only thing to remember on this is that it's NOT a PCI card. A few of the other people that have reviewed this didn't realize that it was a PCI-Express Card.
The great thing is this card comes with the half height (low profile) bracket to use in mini PC cases like the micro media server I have in my entertainment center.
Also the reviewer that says it doesn't work to have 2 separate drives attached is also incorrect. I have 2 1TB esata drives attached both recognized as individual drives under Windows XP Pro with absolutely no issues whatsoever. As for how the RAID functionality works I have no comment since I do not use it.
If your looking for a good fast esata pci-e card look no further.
Mac compatibility issues... (2008-06-10)
2PORT RAID5 Esata Pci 3GBPS External Express Card
This PCI Express card is not compatible with Mac OS 10.5. It doesn't work; and IOGEAR tech support referred me to Silicon Image to find an OS 10.5 driver for their SIL 3132 chipset. IOGEAR has not tested any 10.5 drivers and 'cannot support them'. There is a driver on the CD included with the product that works for Mac OS 10.4 .
Nice! (2008-04-07)
After reading the negative reviews, I thought that it would be appropriate to share a positive experience. I bought this card to use with Western Digital's MyBook Home Edition. I'd seen a number of reviews stating that read/write times were actually faster using USB as opposed to eSATA. Obviously, they weren't using this card. Using the USB connection, it took 1 min 14 secs to copy a 197mb file to the MyBook drive. Using the eSATA connection, it only took 8 secs. Installation went exactly as the instructions indicated.
It is true that this card only works in a PCIe (express) slot. It will not work in PCI or PCIx slots. It works great in my Dell PowerEdge server running Windows 2003 server which only has PCIe slots. I definitely recommend this eSATA adapter.
Flakey, advertising a little misleading (2008-03-07)
I was aware that this was a PCIe card (PCIe was what I was looking for). So, my issues with it have nothing to do with being able to use it in my PC. One of the reasons that I bought it was because I checked the IOgear website and they claim that it supports JBOD. Well, not so much. You can configure drives attached to the 2 ports as one large, virtual drive but not 2 individuals. I tried to configure both as what they refer to as 'Passthru' and one or the other, or both, kept going offline.
So, I figured as long as I had to use both drives as one group, I'd configure as a RAID0 group to gain the benefits. This only works intermittently. The group has gone offline 4 times in the past 3 days. IOgear tech support response was to try a different slot, drives, or computer. Given I only have one computer w/ PCIe slots and the card is installed in the only available slot in that computer, my only option would be to go buy different drives. Don't really want to spend the money to troubleshoot their flakey card. Particularly since the drives seem to work fine when only one is installed at a time.
I wouldn't recommend this card and will be requesting return to Amazon while I look for an alternative.
