Does ANYONE make an expresscard-eSATA card?

Hi all,

I just got a pretty fast laptop (2Ghz core2duo, radeon x1700, etc) and as usual, the laptop hard drive is the bottleneck. I'd like to remedy that with an external drive. I've determined that the best currently-available connection between an external drive and the laptop is eSATA. That's no problem-I can easily get an eSATA expresscard adapter, and I can easily get an external hard drive housing to hold a sata internal drive of my choice. Here's where it gets tricky: I'd like to have the external drive be bootable, and NO ONE seems to make an eSATA expresscard that supports booting.

Unless I severely misunderstand, that means that I can't get the speed boost benefits of the 7200 rpm drive for the operating system (XP pro). Short load times for windows files are one of the main reasons I want a fast external drive in the first place. Does such a card even exist, or am I stuck with the OS on the laptop's slow internal drive?

I can boot from mine. I think the issue is not just with the expresscard itself, but also with your laptop.

I'm not at home right now, but I'll look up the brand and model # for you when I am at home.

No problems yet-I haven't bought a card. I'm still looking for one that supports booting. Please do post your model when you get a chance-if it's the kind of card I need it'll save me a bunch of headache.

Why don't you just get a 7200RPM laptop hard drive and swap it with the one that came with the laptop?

And from the specs you've posted I see you've got an asus f3jp. How does it perform? I'm considering getting one myself.

Because the biggest 7200 rpm laptop drive I can find is 100 GB. The one in it now is 120 GB. I really will end up needing more than 120 GB, so I certainly can't see buying an expensive drive to LOSE 20 GB, not when I can get a faster drive (sata 3.0, perpendicular) and go to at least 320 GB.


Performance-seems fine, though I've yet to do anything other than surf the web and do some emailing. I'll probably do some gaming this coming week when I'm out of town.

not much of a laptop if you have to boot from an external drive...

v8440 said:

Because the biggest 7200 rpm laptop drive I can find is 100 GB. The one in it now is 120 GB. I really will end up needing more than 120 GB, so I certainly can't see buying an expensive drive to LOSE 20 GB, not when I can get a faster drive (sata 3.0, perpendicular) and go to at least 320 GB.


Performance-seems fine, though I've yet to do anything other than surf the web and do some emailing. I'll probably do some gaming this coming week when I'm out of town.

Click to expand...

I agree with a previous post, your defeating the purpose of a laptop. Just get the 7200rpm HDD and also get an external drive for other data.

Well, it's like this: I work out of town a lot, and I have the machine set up in a hotel room. There is room for an external drive in this situation. I like to have a snappy, responsive computer. I also want more storage capacity than what current 7200 rpm laptop drives seem able to provide. So, why not boot it from the external? In fact, why not have the OS on both the external and the internal. That way, I can boot from the internal if it's not practical to have the external, or if the external gets hooped somehow.

This is the one I have - http://www.syba.com/product/43/14/

I got it at Frys.

I can boot from it unto my external drive. Right now I am running vista on my internal drive and XP off the external. Good luck.

I ran into a guy who also wanted bootability, he got the same card and his laptop would not boot from it.

So lots depends on your BIOS.

Thank you sir. I suspect my bios will let me do this, as it's a bios from like Feb of this year. It has an option for booting from external device, but it does not specify how those devices may be connected to the machine. I have sent an email to asus asking whether the expresscard socket can be used for booting. No reply yet, but I expect one today.


*edit* I notice the description of your card in the link you posted does not say it is bootable. Since it obviously IS bootable, this leads me to wonder what other cards are bootable but aren't being described as such. In the absence of solid information about other cards being bootable, I'll simply buy one like yours.

Well, I have an update. I bought the card dvandervelde uses, and I have managed to get the windows install routine to recognize the presence of the card. I did this by slipstreaming the driver for the card into the windows install routine. While I was at it, I also included SP2. When I run the install routine and it gets to the point where you pick what disk or partition you want to install to, my 320 GB external drive is indeed there. I select it, and the windows install goes ahead and completes. When it gets to the first point at which it reboots and should begin booting off the hard drive instead of the install cd, it can't detect the drive. I realize that this is probably because the fact that I put the driver in with my install disk only helps when actually using that disk. This does nothing to help the bios recognize the sata card when the install disk is not present with the driver on it. So, how did you handle this?

BTT

in your bios can you set it to boot off of other devices?

Yes, you can set it to boot off of "external devices". I've tried that, but I still get an error message saying that there's a problem with the configuration of the disk. Whenever I boot the machine, there are two OS choices in the boot menu, just like there ought to be when you have a dual boot setup. It's just that the choice for the external disk does not work.