Pretty cool: msata SSD PCIe card

[Gabe S.]

Hey guys.

I have been considering some different drive setups. I'm tired of listening to my esata external backup enclosure all the time.

The guys from VisionDAW pointed me to something from Addonics. It's a PCIe card that holds 4 msata drives. You can buy 1TB msata drives. So that 4TB of drive space on a single PCI card. And it's bootable. And it's fast as hell. ( http://www.addonics.com/products/ad4mspx2.php ) And the pci card is only $55.

I've already bought two of the pci cards so I can hold up to eight 1TB msata drives. And I've cloned my startup drive to an msata. Works great.

I'm probably going to switch my whole setup to msata on my PowerMac tower. And then use the regular drive bays as my backup drives. Everything inside the box! No more loud external fans and spinning platters!!

Anyway, for anyone with a tower and some open pci slots, this is looking like a nice solution----quiet, fast, cool, and compact.

Cheers.
-gabe

[FMiguelez]

Pretty nice!

I knew of eSata, but mSata? What's that? What's the difference?

[MIDI Life Crisis]

eSATA is external so I assume mSATA is internal (but what the m stands for escapes me).

[rnappi]

eSATA is external so I assume mSATA is internal (but what the m stands for escapes me).

m stands for "mini". These drives have been around for a while and I imagine were designed for laptops. They use to top out at half the read/write speed of 2.5" SATA, but apparently have caught up. If they're reliable, they'd sure be a nice option to load up your tower with a ton of storage.

rich

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Just got off the phone with tech support. He wasn't sure which Macs these cards work with and in a PC you can boot off the first slot. The question about compatibility is whether or not the mac has AHCI driver which all macs running 10.6 or better should have.

Sounds good to me!

[Gabe S.]

My sig shows my setup. My computer booted no problem from the msata on the pci-e card.

The performance on these drives even outpaces my Samsung 840 Pro SSD which is my OS drive.

Anandtech had nothing but good things to say about the Samsung msata drives. ( http://www.anandtech.com/show/7594/sams ... 1tb-review ) Here's what they say in their conclusions:

"With capacity of up to 1TB and an impressive performance result, it is truly a no-compromise mSATA SSD. mSATA is no longer a tradeoff between capacity and size, the EVO mSATA provides everything that the 2.5" EVO does but at ~1/4 the footprint."

Anyway, I figured I would share what I learned about these in case it was useful to you guys.

-g

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I'm glad you did. I;ve been looking for an alternative to overpriced SSD drives and this is it! It'll still cost me at least several hundred to get the kind of storage I want, but much less than replacing my drives and, on top of that, I can simply add four drives, boot of one of the SSDs and still have all my data backed up on the current drives. This is awesome!

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Oh yeah...

THANK YOU!

[Gabe S.]

[mikehalloran]

Has anyone done a comparison between the Samsung 840 and the SandForce SF3700 yet?

Although I've seen lots of announcements from manufacturers that they will have SSDs with the SF3700 controller, I can't tell if anyone is shipping yet. Like the 840, the 3700 is supposed to be available in SATA and mSATA.

With the 1T SATA 840 SSDs shipping for $449, I don't see much point in waiting for anyone to ship an SSD with the SF3700 chip. Especially since my 2010 iMac is stuck at SATA2. I think that I can put two in my iMac if I give up that slooooow SuperDrive. I have the OWC mod for eSATA and can install another in a dock or external enclosure.

I really want an nMP.

[HCMarkus]

This choir is bein' preached to...

http://www.motunation.com/forum/viewtop ... =4&t=57361

SF3700 is still vapor at this point Mike. I'd be buyin' Samsung, and one of these mSATA PCIe cards, if I were in the market today.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I need another week or so until I get paid for 4th qtr broadcasts from 2013. Then I'll be a spendin' foo!