Vantec eSATA PCMCIA Card Review

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by Greg Ross

Do you have too many USB devices?  Enough that you are starting to have bandwidth issues?  Or are you craving a faster external hard drive for backups or media sharing or as a network drive?  Do you desperately need more hard drive space for your laptop, but do not want to get another laptop drive?  If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, do yourself a favor and look into a PCMCIA or ExpressCard eSATA Card to increase your performance.  I did, and here is my take on the Vantec eSATA PCMCIA Card!

Reasons for Buying

(view large image) The big red box certainly looks attractive…

Ever since purchasing my notebook, I have had issues with USB devices.  They work perfectly fine, but the bandwidth is just not enough.  Most of my devices do not need too much bandwidth, so I have been able to just ignore the problem, except for my three external hard drives.  They are slow - really slow - when running on a USB port, and it was to the point that backing up my files or using a drive as a deep media storage bin was truly a poor experience.  I needed some way to speed up my drives, and I had an empty PCMCIA card slot.  I was able to get this card from NewEgg for $31.58 after shipping.

Just to give you an idea, here is a sample HDD analyses with HDTune with my hard drive and all my other devices plugged in over USB.  Please note, most people will never deal with this problem and I am showing this to illustrate my point.

 

(view large image) Yes, it really is that bad.

Specifications

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• Model: UGT-ST350CB
• SATA Ports: 2
• Supported OSes: Windows 98SE/NT4.0/ME/2000/XP (also claims to be Vista compatible according to NewEgg customer comments)
• Max Speed: SATA-II @ 1.5Gbps (Giga-bits per second)
• Supported Hard Drives: SATA II @ 1.5Gbps and 3.0Gbps (but it limits 3.0 drives to 1.5 speeds)

Installation

Installation of the eSATA PCMCIA controller went smoothly and without error.  Push in the card, and then when Windows asks you to point towards the drive in the Hardware Installation Wizard, you point towards the CD drive. (A Vantec CD comes in the package.)  Easy!

After my card was installed, it registered as a Silicon Image SCSI Controller but it does work with SATA!

Notice it is listed as a SCSI controller… (view large image)

The only minor problem with installation was when I attached an external drive into the card when the laptop is running.  It worked perfectly fine, and the drives are indeed hot-swappable as Vantec claims.  But there was about 3-5 seconds in which the laptop just froze.  As in comes to a complete halt, cannot move the mouse, frozen.  I am assuming that this is a driver issue that could be corrected in the future, but as long as you do not shut the laptop down and give it a little time it will resume and run just as fast and bug-free as before.  If you turn the laptop on with the drives plugged in, I noticed a small freeze before trying to sign in and type my password.

Plug it in, plug it in… (view large image)

Please, keep in mind that this freeze only occurs when the drive is plugged in or turned on.  During normal usage there is no lag or problems.

Baseline USB Performance for a 2.5” and 3.5” External Hard Drive

Now that you have seen my pain, let me show you a bandwidth analysis that most people will end up seeing.  Keep in mind that I was only able to get these speeds when the one hard drive I was testing was the ONLY device I had plugged in but most people will see these speeds no matter what.

As a reference, the two drives that will be tested today with the PCMCIA card are:

• Hitachi HTS721010G9AS00 2.5” Hard Drive contained within a Vantec USB &amp; eSATA External Case
  • 100GB
  • 7200RPM
  • USB and eSATA connectivity
• Seagate ST3320620AS 3.5” Hard Drive contained within another Vantec USB &amp; eSATA External Case
  • 320GB
  • 5400RPM
  • USB and eSATA connectivity

When operating either drive over the USB interface, these are the speeds I get (when no other USB device is plugged in).

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This is how the 2.5” and 3.5” drives perform when connected via USB.

PCMCIA Specs and eSATA Performance

Now, what the PCMCIA slot has that USB does not: more bandwidth.  This decade old technology has been continually improved over the years; today’s slots are 32-bit running at 33MHz for about 132-133MB/s.  This is much higher than USB’s maximum speed of 60MB/s, but not quite as fast as the ExpressCard’s available bandwidth.  But for a hard drive, it should be reasonably fast right?  Let us find out.

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Each hard drive can operate much faster now!

As illustrated in the above screen captures, both devices run much faster with less CPU usage.  The two drives run at just about the same speed as my internal hard drive, which is more than fast enough for me.  CPU usage took about a 7-11% dive.

The most curious thing perhaps is that the 3.5” external drive was running at about the same speed as the 2.5” drive.  We all know that 3.5” drives are supposed to be faster, and internal tests done by others indicate the 320GB drive I have should be capable of running at around 70-75MB/s which is well within PCMCIA bandwidth limitations.  Clearly, the bottleneck here is the eSATA Card itself.  Ideally, PCMCIA can use about 132MB/s.  So in practice it will probably yield around 90-100MB/s.  It appears that the eSATA Card equally distributes the available bandwidth to each port regardless of whether a drive is attached or what amount of bandwidth it needs.  Still, 50MB/s is nothing to complain about.

Additionally, the burst rates for the drives do seem to indicate that in specific circumstances each drive can perform a little bit faster, so the eSATA card can be pushed a little further for short periods of time.

Maximal Testing

So what happens when you run both drives at the same time?  If you have both drives attached, but only run a test on one or the other drive at any given time, you will get about the same performance with regards to speed and access times.  However, if you run HDTune tests on both drives at the same time, you get a slightly different story.

Wow!! (view large image)

These two tests were started at about the exact time, and the picture shows it all.  Somehow, somewhere, there is a bottleneck that the card has to deal with.  Be in drivers or hardware, both drives run at sub-par speeds but they are still faster than USB.  In burst mode, which both drives did at the same time, you can easily top out the PCMCIA bandwidth…but during all the other portions of the tests the drives were limited to a combined transfer rate of about 70-75MB/s.  Clearly, some software processing overhead is at work here and is likely some type of latency effect as the card switches between controlling each hard drive.  The telling clue about this is as one drive’s bandwidth declined, the other one’s rose by about the same margin.  CPU usage seems to be about right at 15% to run both drives (remember, each drive was using around 6-7% earlier), so once again the card appears to be a bottleneck.

Performance Summary and Conclusion

A lot of information deserves a table, so here is a complete breakdown of how these devices perform in any given condition.

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Clearly, the Vantec eSATA PCMCIA card will provide much better performance than the same USB solution.  While the PCMCIA bus is not as fast as the ExpressCard bus, this card certainly does the best that it can with the bandwidth it has and consistently outperforms USB in any situation.  The only downside is that performance will not be optimal when running two drives at the same time.

Pros

• Allows for MUCH faster data transfer rates than most other solutions (USB, FW400, FW800)
• Lower CPU usage during HDD use.
• Supports two eSATA external drives (think software based RAID!!!).

Cons

• Bottleneck of about 50MB/s when using one drive.
• Bottleneck limiting total transfer of around 70-80MB/s when using two drives simultaneously, but burst mode speeds seem to approach PCMCIA bandwidth limits.
• Unconfirmed capability with Vista.

 

Thanks for a very helpful review.

It's good to know that the PCMCIA slot has such a high bandwidth.

John

 

I would be interested in knowing what type of notebook (chipset/etc.) used.

Did you ever consider a NAS solution? If the notebook had gigabit ethernet, NAS might be worth looking into.

 

Is there any express card variant of this product? Sadly, most nbs out today lack a PCMCIA slot, as well as an eSATA port. Would be good if there's something similar for express card slots.....

EDIT: Redundant question. I should have googled first. They exist, both for 34 and 54 form factors.

 

I had to give up trying to get a PCMCIA sata card to work with my old Toshiba laptop. 2 different chipsets, one half worked, the other not at all.

Worth baring in mind..

 

"Worth baring in mind.."

 

Thanks!

It is an HP Compaq nc8430, and the chipset is the Intel ICH7 (I believe the ICH7M).

I thought about NAS, but I can never find a good solution that gets a lot of positive reviews and few negatives. Many say there are problems with larger files, corrupted large files, and sometimes slow transfers. Plus, my backup solution (home version of Acronis) does not support NAS drive access so I would have to pull the drive every time I needed to restore.

Yup, and NBR has a review of another EC controller as well. I think it is on page 2 or 3 now.

 

how do you power the hard drives?

 

Greg, great work and comparison testing!

Regarding the driver issue - I have had a few PCMCIA cards that just freeze the screen. It's definitely a driver issue...and sometimes I never got some things to work properly as a result. At least it wasn't that big of a deal for you.

 

I'm glad you're amused..even more hilarious when you buy items that don't work with your machine(s).

 

This reviewer never actually gets to the point, which is this: If get this card, then you most likely have to purchase a new external hard drive to go with it. The reviewer assumes the card is a one-step solution to your USB speed issues, when you would likely have to throw away your old external hard drive enclosures and buy new ones. You might try busting your internal hard drives out of their USB external boxes and pray that they are SATA drives (which they almost certainly are not) to find out that you can't plug them into your new SATA card at all and you still need brand new drives. This reviewer forgets to note that SATA connection cables are required (are they supplied? who knows, the reviewer doesn't say) as is a a power source for the drive, which isn't even discussed.

 

If you have an external enclosure, to house the external drive, it shouldn't need explaining that you use a cable to connect to the notebook.

 

Looks like the earlier eSATA Express card review shows much better performance on the same 320GB drive...~62 vrs 45 MB/sec average.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=135056

 

Two AC adapters for them.

Ok, here's some info for you:
1) I would always recommend building your own external drive (easy to do), and many standalone's also have USB & eSATA connections now. That way it is easier to just upgrade the drive and/or enclosure in the future if you ever need to.
2) SATA Cables are usually included with the eSATA hard drives. The PCMCIA card package did not have any SATA cables. That is why it wasn't discussed.
3) External hard drives always will come with included power plugs and needed cords to get the drives running.

Thanks for pointing out what I didn't mention. Feel free to let me know if you are interested in more information and I'll post it here. Same for anyone else who has questions!

Also, if you look in my profile User Notes you can see links to quite a few reviews I have done for this site. If you, or any one else, has comments and/or questions about any of them...or want to provide feedback and suggestions for how to improve on my reviews...I will be happy to listen.

When Kevin posted his review, I was surprised to find out he had the same drive. It was one of the reasons that I decided to purchase this card and review it, as the eSATA interface showed some promise according to Kevin. But his card was ExpressCard, and mine is PCMCIA. That explains the performance difference right away.

 

Yeah, I've heard the same...there are even some NewEgg reviews that say what laptops it did not work with. As mentioned in my review though, it does freeze but only briefly. If the card is plugged in during boot up, it just freezes the boot a little bit so I don't really notice it.

 

Thanks for the great review Greg! This is exactly the review I've been looking for.
It seems a PCMCIA card will be enough for most of the 2.5" hard drives but can be the bottleneck if you want to use it with a high capacity 3.5" 7200rpm drives.

 

I have had bad experiences with PCMCIA adapter cards, I had a PCMCIA to USB 2.0 device (taking power from the mouse port), I moved my laptop while it was plugged in, and the power to the drive came off and on, corupting sectors and rendering the drive locked.

Might have baan a faulty card but I have also had problems with other PCMCIA cards, fine for mouses and scanners etc but I am a bit dubious in using adapters for external HDDs.

Let us know how reliabe this one is, it would be useful for Photoshop users who could have an external drive running fast enough to use as a scratch disk.

 

Definitely a bottleneck...though you cannot necessarily complain too much about 50MB/s

PCMCIA card slots tend to be problematic...at least from what I've read. It is possible the PC is the problem and not the card. But in my case, I've never had an issue with stability problems or corrupt drives.

Oh, and as an update I can now confirm drivers for this card are available via Windows driver downloads and Vista was able to download and install the drivers no problem. I had to let it fail, and then manually install them. But it worked.

EDIT: Update on the drivers, they crash the system on boot but if you plug in the card after completely booting then you are fine...use at your own risk.

 

20M/s is fast enough for me

but where can I get it in Canada?

 

For the past few weeks I've been trying to research any reviews and experiences with various PCMCIA Cardbus e-sata cards. I have an Asus G1 so I'm stuck with PCMCIA (unfortunately), usb2, or firewire 400.

So far, the best potential card seems to be this one by Firmtek:
http://firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-1sm2/

There is a powerbook review using this cardbus card here:

Barefeats review of firmtek e-sata cardbus card

In the review above the reviewer posted ~ 100 MB/s sustained Reads/Writes through the aforementionoed PCMCIA Cardbus E-sata card. Granted this is using a RAID 0 enclosure it shows that the cardbus interface might not actually be a bottleneck if implemented efficiently in the card.

For single drive performance it averaged around 50-60 MB/s.

Another review by this same site using a more generic Cardbus Card (no longer available) posted speeds of 60MB/s sustained read and 70MB/s sustained write using a single sata drive through a cardbus e-sata card!

Barefeats Cardbus Sata on Powerbook G4 review

It shouldn't have anything to do with it being a powerbook right? I would think that the chipset in the Asus G1 would be able to handle this workload anyways.

I'm very impressed with these cards when compared to the other brands I've seen reviewed here: Tom's Hardware Addonics Cardbus Adapter Review (seems to have a bottleneck in write speed)

This review (45-50 MB/s averages).

The only downside is the pricetag: $90 for the firmtek card

I recently purchased a cheap Syba e-sata cardbus card that had downright pathetic performance (10 MB/s !!). I used a 7200 WD 250GB sata harddrive in a vantec e-sata enclosure which got good reviews so I'm pretty sure it isn't at fault (the usb goes at a brisk 20-30 MB/s). I guess you get what you pay for sometimes.

So i'm willing to shell out the dough if it's really going to give me 50-70 MB/s read/writes, but I really wish I could figure out why many of the other cards are doing so poorely compared to this more expensive card.

Any thoughts/experiences/advice would be greatly appreciated .

On a sidenote: I've been looking at the silicon image chips used in these devices to see if I could find some kind of relationship between speed/chipset used. However, the syba card i bought (gave me 10MB/s max!!) used the Sil3512 chip which is the same one used in the Firmtek card and Vantec card. The addonics one uses a Sil3124. So it looks like something other than just the chip matters...

 

It seems my Rosewill RC-604 card is a little bit faster (speed tops around 63MB/sec with one HDD installed), although it is still slower than those Expresscard.

 

thanks, this is exactly what i was looking for...something cheap that works great.

 

I'm running a "noname" cardbus sata card (sata I) with an Icybox sata/USB 2.0 enclosure - on my desktop with esata on the motherboard HD-tach measure it with 79 MB/s transfer rate (Burst 160 MB/s), on my old desktop with a SATA-card in the pci-bus it measures 62 MB/s (max 70 MB/s), on the cardbus SATA on my hp evo 620c it measures only 40 MB/s but steady all over the HD (the bus/card) is limiting on the USB 2.0 on the laptop i measures 20 MB/s. The drive is a WD 500 GB AAKS.
Interesting to see some higher numbers.
GREG, In another thread you mentioned that you would buy the advanced docking station for your nc8430 - did you get it? If yes, how works the esata on the dockingstation - i´ll will have a nc8430 on my job very soon, so still no exprescard....

 

i'm receiving my Rosewill RC-604 in the mail today, so I'll be back with an update regarding one and two disk performance. very excited based on dickeywang's review.

 

This review has one false statement.

"the 320GB drive I have should be capable of running at around 70-75MB/s which is well within PCMCIA bandwidth limitations. Clearly, the bottleneck here is the eSATA Card itself. Ideally, PCMCIA can use about 132MB/s."

This is not true. The bottleneck is in the PCMCIA controller on your notebook. Take a look at this article:
http://2xod.com/articles/eSATA%20Performance%20of%20Various%20Cardbus%20Controllers/

It seems as though your performance will vary more depending on the laptop you use rather than the eSATA card. The Initio 1620 based cards seem to have greater overall compatibility.

 

I just benchmarked a generic ebay SATA PCMCIA card.
Cost me about $10. Its distributed by cross-mark co. http://www.cross-mark.com/sata-serial-port-cardbus-pcmcia-card-p-113.html?cPath=31_95
Windows reports it has having a VIA VT6421 chip. Apparently supports raid, presumably software/firmware.

I tested it with a Seagate 320gb 7200.10 ST3320620AS. Should get ~70MB/s over native sata. Tops out at almost exactly 55MB/sec, flat line on the graph (HDTach). It does burst at 78.6MB/s though.

Tested in my D.ell Inspiron 9300, which according to windows has a "Ricoh 5C476(II)" cardbus controller.

All in all, it seems these ebay sata cardbus adaptors aren't bad, although the poster above me suggests poor performance is more to do with the cardbus controller rather than the sata card itself.

 

megaphat:
How do you connect it to your laptop? Via SATA-SATA cable, and HDD via a separate power cable?
I have Lenovo X61 with the same chip and some chinese noname device with the same VIA chip. When I tried to connect it via SATA-eSATA connector I got only errors!

 

Will teh eSATA drive installed throught the PCMCIA card show up as a fixed drive or as a removable drive?

 

It uses an eSATA port. It treats the drive as a fixed drive, but you can insert and remove it at will without a problem.