Tech Goes Boom

Mini-review: Seritek 1EN2 and 1VE4

Firmtek is one of the leading providers of SATA solutions to the Mac world. Their line of external and internal SATA cards offer driver-less convenience and best of class speeds.

Why SATA? SATA is currently the fastest external drive solution short of SCSI. It blows firewire 800 out of the water, especially considering the flaws of the G5 logic board which keep it from achieving fast FW800 RAID speeds.

I recently ordered a combination 1VE4 and 1EN2 enclosure for a backup solution.

The external enclosure is a lot smaller than you would think, and the two drive trays are very simple and sparse. This is mainly because the 1EN2 has the drives plugging directly into the backplane of the case instead of having an intermediate board or cable in between. This means less interference and less chance for corruption.

The cable connections are scary firm and hard to plug into the card. I was afraid of breaking them I had to press so hard. I'm not sure if this was because of the shielded external cables or just new plastic on the card connectors. In subsequent plugging and unplugging this got easier. Be warned though, I can't imagine reaching blindly around the back of the computer to plug these in the first time.

A couple of people carry this case around the net including cool drives, Although I haven't found anywhere that sells it significantly cheaper. But if you don't care about boot-ability you can get a cheap 2 port SATA card for mac here.

With these enclosures, each individual drive gets an SATA cable, meaning if you have a 4 drive setup, you will have 4 cables hanging out. Not necessarily the prettiest solution, but by far the fastest. There are cases that will give you a single SATA port to string to your computer, but this will limit you to 150MB/sec max.

The Firmtek solution is a very nice one. Paired up with fast SATA drives and OS X's built in striping, you can have a very fast drive solution. Of course, you can add more of these external enclosures and drives to make faster solutions.

For speeds and other stats check out the following excellent reviews:

AMUG
Barefeats