Red Station Esata vs FW800

[James Drake]

As was already stated...
On our 17" MBP i7, when we use eSata it's a 30 min transfer via FW 800 from a full 128. If we use FW 800 Daisy chain, its an hour. Needless to say, so ready for thunderbolt.

[Alexander Alexandrov]

i run esata cable from the motherboard
unfortunately my mac pro late 08 requires a restart to see the new drive mounted to this esata.

no reboot required when using esata card.

[Diego el abuelo]

i have it inthat way. optical drive.

but i lose the plug an play option, so i must restart the Mac before plug and un plug. but its ok

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Jeff Kilgore had a work around that involved running cables out the side of the MAC. so he bought an extra side panelt drille a hole and lined it wit rubber and voila. Then when its time to sell the mac he
will put back the original side panel so as not to void warranty. I think he actually ran the BM HDMI out the side. so it didnt take a slot.

Yep, did this with a 2008 Mac Pro when installing a RED Rocket. I came across a junk Mac Pro case, but the removable side panel was still good, so I made use of it. A rather elegant solution. Just drilled some holes to mount the BNC connectors, as they would mount in a rear slot cover.

In other systems I've done, with no free slot for things to run out from, a handy way to do it is nip the BNC connectors off the ends of the cables for the rocket. Run those cables through any of the hundreds of small holes on the back side of the Mac Pro, then reattach new connectors. I use Liberty or Canare 23AWG mini-coax connectors.

i have it inthat way. optical drive.

but i lose the plug an play option, so i must restart the Mac before plug and un plug. but its ok

the internal SATA ports, both in the lower optical bay on '09 and newer Macs and the ODD headers on the logic board in the pre-'09 models, are not fully compliant for eSATA use. They are no-frills SATA ports, just meant for optical devices. So yeah, lots of functionality not there -- hot-swap, sleep mode detection, etc.. They work just fine though once you're connected and the device is recognized. Biggest thing to worry about is the grounding. Make sure your eSATA connections are properly grounded! Also simple to do, you can usually ground right to the system case. Most internal SATA to eSATA brackets have tabs making contact with the slot plate they use, which in turn provides grounding. When you have to worry is when you just run an adapter cable from the port out of a hole in the back of the case.

Most port multiplier devices will NOT work with these internal SATA headers. They just don't have the necessary support to do so.

[jimhare]

I just got an internal Mac Pro to eSata cable and got it working with the Red Station.

Did a transfer test using eSata and Firewire, each time to an internal SATA drive. They were pretty much identical in transfer speed.

Is this because both my destination SATA and Red Station (eSata) are on the same buss? I thought it would be much faster using eSata.

Or is it because it's on a 1st gen Mac Pro quad core? I haven't tried it on my 2010 hex core, wanted to troubleshoot on a machine I wasn't as afraid of blowing up!

UPDATE:

Just repeated the test, this time going to my external raid (PCIe card) and eSata was about twice as fast as FW800.

So I guess the moral is if you are copying to internal SATA drives you won't experience a noticeable difference between eSata and FW800?

[F. Malmer]

We've just started using eSATA through an add-in board put into a Maxxdigital redrocket/raid box with a MBP 17" expresscard cable. Anyways, that's the setup. The only way for me to swap cards without rebooting is the following procedure:

1) Boot up the machine with a red volume formated SSD inserted. It mounts automatically on the desktop.
2) In red watcher choose the card and eject.
3) Power off the redstation (atleast that's what the manual says, but this thing works even if you don't).
4) Remove the card and insert your new card you want to copy from. Power on again.
5) In red watchdog select mount (the name in the list will be the same as the first card, but don't worry about that)
6) Wait roughly 30 seconds (!) before the card is mounted and on the desktop. If it doesn't appear then hit mount again and wait some more.
7) Copy your files as usual
8) Goto 3 (Edit: Eject your SSD via the RED watchdog before going to 3).

Works for me. Can be a bit frustrating waiting for it to mount, but it works. And compared to copying over firewire it is much faster anyways.

[Kyle Gentz]

But how in the Hell do you get eSata into a Mac running a rocket, quadro, BM and video card with no Cubix?

I guess we don't.

If you dont mind having the case open, you could do sata to esata cable. They have ones made for macs. Something like this. http://www.sonnettech.com/product/es...ndercable.html

[Elliott Balsley]

Has anyone else had success with F. Malmer's method above? It doesn't sound too terribly inconvenient — just a 30 second delay on each mag. I would love to do this, and free up a PCIe slot if I can.