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I have not tried the eSATA ports, and probably never will. Unfortunately OWC doesn't sell an expansion card with USB 3 only.
I would recommend this item to a friend! This review is from NewerTech MAXPower 2x2 USB + eSATA 6G PCIe Expansion Card.I also have many RAID chassis and arrays like 2 of the OWC RackPro Units and a two drive Mercury Elite and I keep coming back to OWC as they just work like they should. OWC are the only brand that have never failed in my studio. NEVER. Not once. Everything else has, costing me time, money and business. Try this card. You won't regret it.
I would recommend this item to a friend!I already had the non-RAID version of this card, which gave me two eSATA ports, but not with port-multiplier support. I was looking for at least two more ports that I could use with my Cavalry 4 x 1TB enclosure and a future enclosure. Every card that I considered in the <$300 category had a range of limitations. This card appeared to have good throughput, support for drive power management, and RAID was a nice touch for the price.
Overall, I am quite pleased with it, but I did note some difficulties along the way. I installed this card in my 2009 Mac Pro, then booted up and installed the software on the included disk. After a reboot, that gave me access to the web interface. The web interface is pretty simple, although not always intuitive. After a few stumbles, I got my external enclosure set up with RAID 5. It took about 24 hours to initialize.
Before I got to that point, I had some difficulties. I am running Lion, so that may be a contributing factor. After I set the web interface to initialize the new array, OS X panicked. On reboot, it panicked again, so that I was unable to boot the machine. Powering down the enclosure fixed that problem. I then went to the Newertech web site and downloaded and installed the latest software. After that, I was able to reboot, turn on the enclosure, and the array proceeded to build without further incident. So, I recommend getting the latest and greatest from Newertech's site before trying to build an array.
Once the array was built, OS X didn't see it. I thought that I might power off the enclosure and power it back on to get the system to recognize the new drive. That not only didn't work, but it triggered a very loud alarm buzzer that took me several minutes to figure out how to turn off. It turned out that I just needed to reboot to get OS X to see the new drive.
I initialized it in the Disk Utility and proceeded to copy about 1 TB of stuff to the drive. I didn't run any benchmarks, but the transfer speed was indistinguishable from my internal SATA drives and much, much better than over the USB interface I had previously used.
Anyway, so far, so good.
I would recommend this item to a friend! This review is from NewerTech MAXPower 2-Port eSATA 6G PCIe Expansion Card.
