[calverson]

What I want to do is get one of those express34 cards that have 2 eSata ports, get 2 500GB 7200RPM external drives, and configure this with RAID 0, and use that as my PS scratch disk, for video editing.

Has anyone does this? I assume it would be a fair bit faster than using a single FW800 drive, but I dont know what write/read speeds the express slot is limited to.

[calverson]

The other alternative it to create a SAN with the RAID configuration and a lightweight linux distro, but I am assuming it would be faster to have the express card?

Then there is the issue of portability...

[amazing]

Check this thread, you'll find a link in one of my posts to the xlr8yourmac.com database on experiences with esata cards. In addition to my problematic experiences detailed in that thread, you'll find other experiences in the database.

http://forums.macnn.com/69/mac-noteb...tion-with-mbp/

Perhaps the Sonnet card is more reliable but it's also considerably more expensive, and therefore there isn't that much user feedback.

I'm waiting for the opinions of the 10.5.7 update to stabilize before I try it, but I'm hoping that perhaps Apple has tweaked the esata interface in the direction of more reliability. I will eventually install it and test out my 2 esata cards and my 3 external HDs once again.

Anybody else got any feedback?

All this to say that I'd be checking out fw-800 instead.

[mduell]

I'd go with a single 300GB VelociRaptor on eSATA rather than a pair of 500s, unlesss you need a lot of scratch space (>100GB).