Review: MAXPower eSATA 6G PCIe 2.0 Controller Card

Product Reviewed: MAXPower eSATA 6G PCIe 2.0 Controller Card
Retail price: $59.99
Vendor: Other World Computing
Warranty: 3 year NewerTech repair / replacement warranty

A few days ago, I reviewed the OWC Slim, an ExpressCard/34 to eSATA adapter for laptop computers. Today, I’ll be reviewing the MAXPower eSATA 6 Gb/s PCIe 2.0 Controller Card (henceforth referred to as MAXPower eSATA, for brevity), which provides two additional 6 Gb/s eSATA ports for desktop Mac and PC platforms.

For this review, I tested the MAXPower eSATA with a 2008 Mac Pro, running Mac OS X 10.6.3 (Snow Leopard).

Who’s It For

The MAXPower eSATA card is perfect for users looking to add additional SATA ports for their desktop machine. No drivers are required for Mac OS X (10.5 and up), Windows (Vista and 7) and Linux machines with built-in AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) support. The card boasts true plug-n-play for machines that meet its technical specifications.

What’s in the Box

Included in the box is the MAXpower eSATA card, a CD containing Windows drivers (for machines that do not have AHCI support on the motherboard), an instruction manual and an extra low profile aluminum bracket for your card (should you need it).

Installation

Installation on a Mac Pro involved powering the unit down, unplugging it, grounding myself against static electricity, opening the case, and adding the card to an available PCIe slot. There are 3 such slots in my Mac Pro (see below):

The actual install was very straight forward and easy. Even if you’ve never opened up your computer before, you should find this pretty straight forward. I installed the card in slot 2. From the photo below, you can see there’s plenty of room to spare.

Here’s a photo of the card as seen from the back of the computer. The SATA ports on the card sit flush with the machine.

The card with a SATA cable plugged into it.

Once the card has been installed, put the case back on, plug it in, attach your favorite eSATA based storage solution, and turn on your computer. No drivers needed. That’s all there is to it!

So How Fast is It?

For the purpose of my benchmarks, I attached the same 500GB Mercury Elite-AL Pro 500GB drive from my previous OWC Slim review. (I’ll be reviewing the drive itself in the next few weeks.)

First, here are the standard Firewire 800 benchmarks with the Mac Pro:

And here are the benchmarks using the MAXPower eSATA card:

Taking the averages we can see that the MAXPower card with the OWC Mercury Elite performs at least 1.55 times as fast as FW800 for reads. For writes, the MAXPower card is at least 1.8 times as fast as FW800 on the Mac Pro. Furthermore, the MAXPower eSATA card results are comparable in speed to the OWC Slim card for the Macbook Pro.

S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) support is provided with the card on the Mac side, enabling you to check a drive’s status, to see if it’s functioning properly or not.

The MAXPower eSATA card can theoretically deliver 6Gb/s (500MB/s). The limiting factor in my tests so far has been the drive itself, due to the intrinsic data transfer rates of external SATA drives. In the near future, I hope to test the eSATA card with an external SSD drive to see the additional performance gains.

Conclusions:

The MAXPower eSATA card is easy to install and delivers where it counts: in performance. It’s fully plug and play, supports Leopard and Snow Leopard (including 64-bit SL, which I’m running). The MAXPower eSATA card supports booting on Windows with AHCI enabled in the BIOS, but does NOT support booting on the Mac side (Mac users beware). This would be my only caveat to the card. Barring that, with a 3 year factory warranty and a reasonable price, NewerTech has another solid product on its hands.

The card receives 4/5 Bob Weiners:

Krishna June 15, 2010 Mac Pro PCIe cards, PCIe Controller card for Mac and PCs, PCIe controller card review