Why is it impossible to find a simple 4-port eSATA PCI-e card?

miniyazz · 13 Nov 2010 at 12:42

There are hundreds of 2 SATA, 2 eSATA PCI-e expansion cards out there for <£20. Yet try to find one with 4 eSATA and no SATA, and you're left with PCI-X cards costing up to hundreds of pounds (and one out-of-stock PCI card which means buying into a dying technology).

Surely no extra technology is needed to have 4 eSATA ports instead of 2 SATA and 2 eSATA?

Why is it so hard? :mad:

On a related note, there aren't any problems with using a SATA-->eSATA adaptor cable that I should be aware of are there?

Cheers

JonJ678 · 13 Nov 2010 at 13:59

sata and esata are electrically the same as each other. A cable with an internal sata plug on one end and an external one on the other just has wires running straight through it. So if you have four spare sata ports on your motherboard you only need a back plate with esata sockets on it. If these aren't available in four-esata versions you could get two, unscrew the connectors and cut holes in the case / spare pci cover.

Even this version, with no electronics, is remarkably hard to find though

I think I'd get two readily available two port ones and take them apart.

Apple make some pci-e x4 ones, for a mere $250, so they are out there. "quad esata card" has been the most useful string so far.

rpstewart · 13 Nov 2010 at 15:00

Just be careful when looking at 2xSATA, 2xeSATA cards. A lot of them are only 2 port cards, you need to select which 2 out of the 4 ports you want active with jumpers on the board.

miniyazz · 13 Nov 2010 at 17:32

Thanks JonJ, I thought that was the case with SATA/eSATA. I do have plenty of SATA ports free (it has 10

) so that's certainly another option, I was just hoping to manage by adding a single expansion card that I could port to another system with fewer SATA ports if the need arose. Obviously, as you've discovered too, they're hard to come by at a reasonable price, and from what rpstewart has said, it looks like the reason they cost so much in comparison to the ones that do two SATA two eSATA is that the ones that do two of each actually only do a total of two at once.

Anyway, I have enough PCI slots free for two cards, so I'll probably use one dedicated PCI-e card with 2xeSATA, and one backplate providing 2xeSATA via motherboard SATA ports, as I happen to have a backplate lying around with two ports on. They're presumably only going to be outdated as SATA 6gbps comes along anyway, so I don't want to be spending much on them

Cheers for the info.