<< November 3, 2007 >>
some blathering

in addition to the new drives, i got a couple new enclosures for them (i think i have something like 10 total, now. it's really sad), as well. anyway, these are some pretty awesome sata enclosures.

i had a couple of older rosewill enclosures that i liked, and these are sata+usb, metal, and they've now added a fan switch. how could i resist? the other main complaint about the older ones - their sun-bright blue led - has been addressed as well; the new led is of a much softer intensity.

and i know what you're saying... didn't i already get burned by sata? well, i have some sort of faith that things can improve in four years. i don't know why.

anyway, since my laptop doesn't have any eSATA ports, i also purchased a rosewill sata II expresscard. i imagine that if the sata controller and enclosure are the same, they enable some proprietary protocol to get like 2% better performance or something. i dunno. well that and they had a link to mac drivers.

so i install the driver, plug the drive in, and the drive shows up. i get time machine started on it, but for some reason decide to go poke around System Profiler. there's nothing in pc cards, pci cards, or serial-ata, but i do notice a disk controller in usb. why is my 2.5-3.0 gbps (not that the disk can actually drive that) device going over the 480 mbps bus? i hate buying hardware.

i actually made an order for a different card, and was going to return this one, but noticed that they both had the same chipset, and that the docs there said that it lives off the pcie bus. so, either they are lying, these drivers are crap, or who knows. but maybe i shouldn't order a new card yet, until i can really research it this weekend.

well, after spending most of today reinstalling vista (twice! - something happened, and well the control panel was empty, and, i dunno), i'm back in os x, and well now the expresscard is showing up in pci cards, and not in usb. xbench confirms:

this is a pretty good benchmark, as the computer, disk, and enclosure are all the same. the difference is simply which interface it's connected over.

so, at least one thing went right today.