I have been running out room on my Mac Pro and needed to get an external drive. I have one Aperture library that is nearly 500GB in size. I wanted a off-the-shelf Mac drive that was inexpensive that would have fast throughput. USB 2.0 and Firewire just aren't fast enough. So, I initially got an eSATA PCIe card for my Mac that allows SATA connections with external drives. Unfortunately, either the card, the driver, or both didn't provide the 3Gb/sec speed I require. In fact, the transfer speeds were running at slower than USB speeds so it turned out to be worthless to me. Luckily I found a solution:
http://www.newertech.com/products/esata_cable.php Not bad and it costs $19 plus shipping. Since, it turns out, the Mac Pro's made between 2006 and 2008 have two add'l SATA ports on the motherboards you can install this kit and get two eSATA connections on the back of your machine. What's really nice is that since you're plugging into native ports on the motherboard (vs. going through a card), the Mac just treats the drive just like internal storage, no drivers needed. The downside, for some, is that you have to basically take your machine apart to get to the ports. It requires removing the ram risers, all installed cards, all hard drives, the processor cover, and the front fan assembly. Sounds like an incredible pain, but really is quite simple as Mac Pros are designed to be reconfigured easily. I'm running a super cheap ($159) WD My Book 1.5T drive via the eSATA connection and I can now run my largest Aperture library from this drive just as if it were an internal drive. You do need to turn the drive on before start up, however, but the drive then turns off on its own when the system shuts down. This will do until USB 3.0 becomes affordable. -Brendan -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
