marshall_stack Posted December 5, 2010 Share Posted December 5, 2010 I finally got 'round to picking up a LaCie SATA II ExpressCard 34 to connect my Glyph GT 050Q (Oxford 924 chipset) to my late 2008 MacBook Pro. Upon looking through the Glyph manual I noticed the specs don't specifically mention a SATA II interface, just eSATA, even though it claims the drives inside are Seagate SATA II drives. Is this going to work? I assume SATA II would be backwards compatible with SATA I, but are the connectors the same? I haven't opened the package yet as I still need to get an eSATA cable on Monday. Assuming this does work, would I be able to connect both a SATA and SATA II device and get appropriate speeds on both devices? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jordi Torres Posted December 5, 2010 Share Posted December 5, 2010 I assume SATA II would be backwards compatible with SATA I That's right. but are the connectors the same? You'll be dealing with eSATA connectors, and both your Glyph drive and the Lacie card have those. The only thing to worry about (and I say this from my own experience with one of these eSATA / ExpressCard 34 adapter cards...although it wasn't a Lacie) is the driver's stability. I got occasional Kernel Panics with my card. I don't use it anymore. J. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marshall_stack Posted December 5, 2010 Author Share Posted December 5, 2010 Thanks for clearing up the connector issue. I found this on the LaCie website as well, "Serial ATA operates in a point-to-point topology. This connectivity methodology delivers the entire available interface bandwidth to each device, allowing each device to operate at its maximum throughput". Assuming I don't experience any driver issues, it looks like I should get the maximum available throughput from each connected device. I'm planning to get a Glyph GT 062E 500GB (SATA II) running RAID 0 and use it as my recording drive and use the Glyph GT 050Q 1.5TB (SATA I) for storage/playback, both running off the ExpressCard. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marshall_stack Posted December 7, 2010 Author Share Posted December 7, 2010 I picked up an eSATA cable today, installed the drivers for the card, hooked it all up and it seems to be working fine. I re-mixed and bounced a Logic project to disk with no problems and I haven't had any Logic crashes, kernel panics or other weird behavior. I'll have to do some recording with 10 or more tracks enabled to really test it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jordi Torres Posted December 7, 2010 Share Posted December 7, 2010 I picked up an eSATA cable today, installed the drivers for the card, hooked it all up and it seems to be working fine. I re-mixed and bounced a Logic project to disk with no problems and I haven't had any Logic crashes, kernel panics or other weird behavior. I'll have to do some recording with 10 or more tracks enabled to really test it. Glad to know so far so good, hopefully it stays that way. Please post back after you do more tests, maybe I'll get that card too. Cheers, J. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marshall_stack Posted December 13, 2010 Author Share Posted December 13, 2010 I recorded my band's rehearsal last night - 8 drum tracks (4 mono + 2 stereo pairs; analog out from a Roland TD-20 V-Drums), 2 guitar tracks (left and right from a POD Pro/G-System), 1 DI bass track and 2 vocal mics - for a grand total of 9 mono + 2 stereo tracks (13 audio streams at 24bit/48kHz). I'm happy to report no crashes, no "device too slow" recording stalls, no waiting for the HD to spin up after pressing record - all issues I had intermittently experienced when the Glyph was connected through USB or Firewire. So far, my only complaint about the LaCie card is that the connection to the Mac via the express card slot seems a bit tenuous.. it seems like the slightest bump of the housing or accidental tug on the eSATA cable could make the card pop right out of the slot. I noticed during installation that it doesn't seem to lock solidly into place. Maybe that's just inherent of all express cards but I don't have experience with any other express card to judge by. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jordi Torres Posted December 13, 2010 Share Posted December 13, 2010 I recorded my band's rehearsal last night - 8 drum tracks (4 mono + 2 stereo pairs; analog out from a Roland TD-20 V-Drums), 2 guitar tracks (left and right from a POD Pro/G-System), 1 DI bass track and 2 vocal mics - for a grand total of 9 mono + 2 stereo tracks (13 audio streams at 24bit/48kHz). I'm happy to report no crashes, no "device too slow" recording stalls, no waiting for the HD to spin up after pressing record - all issues I had intermittently experienced when the Glyph was connected through USB or Firewire. That's great, thanks for reporting back! So far, my only complaint about the LaCie card is that the connection to the Mac via the express card slot seems a bit tenuous.. it seems like the slightest bump of the housing or accidental tug on the eSATA cable could make the card pop right out of the slot. I noticed during installation that it doesn't seem to lock solidly into place. Maybe that's just inherent of all express cards but I don't have experience with any other express card to judge by. I don't have that problem with mine, I have to push it in with a reasonable amount of force so that it pops out. J. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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