Are you looking to dive into eSATA technology? Check out the ExtremeTech review of the Seagate eSATA 300GB and the Promise SATA300 TX 4302 here on their website. First – the Seagate eSATA 300GB product. It ships with a Promise eSATA300 TX2 controller card since many motherboards don’t support eSATA as of yet. No worries on the cables too – it comes with a shielded eSATA cable. The drive itself is a 7200 RPM 3GB/s SATA drive with a 16MB cache and support for NCQ. You’ll easily get performance that’s way faster than an external USB or Firewire drive since the drive pretty much acts like an internal SATA drive.

The second product looked at by ExtremeTech is the standalone Promise ESATA300 TX4302. It’s similar to the Promise eSATA TX2 controller except it adds two more internal SATA ports and it comes with onboard connectors for LEDS and an SMBus port. Here are the verdicts from ExtremeTech – for the drive, it’s:

A complete and painless eSATA package—300 GB hard drive, enclosure, controller card, and external cable—with an attractive price tag to match.

For the standalone card, it’s:

An affordable PCI eSATA controller card, but only supports Windows for now.

[Check it out]

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