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I have a Macbook Pro and do all my development on it. That being said, I need to have 1 or 2 Virtual Machines open pretty much all the time, 1 acting as a web server, the other as a Media/FTP server. With the small 120GB hard drive on the laptop, my space gets eaten up pretty fast when using the local HD, not to mention the slow 5400 RPM transfer rate does slow down overall performance.
So what I did to resolve this was purchase a Sonnet Tempo SATA ExpressCard/34 card. It has 2 SATA ports on it and I have it running to my Nexstar3 enclosure via the eSATA on the back of it.
It is nice because the drive inside the enclosure is a 7200 RPM Maxtor with I believe a 16GB cache, so its definitely faster then the drive I have in the Macbook.
Not only has this device saved me about 30GB of space on my Laptop's hard drive, but my virtual machines (running Parallels 4.0), run much faster, load/suspend/shut down all seem to have improvements, and overall responsiveness seems to be better. In addition it's nice to have my virtual machines saved on an external drive so I can just plug my external into my desktop PC when I do my scheduled backups. Much faster then going over the network.
The SATA ports on the card can run at 3.0gb/s, you probably won't get that fast unless your doing some hardcore video editing or data processing, but it's good to know you have that capability.
The support at Sonnet Tech is always great, very responsive, and good support. They respond to your questions as fast as like 5-10 minutes from sending them a request.
If you are looking for a way to save hard drive space on my laptop while increasing VM performance, I highly recommend this card.
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Sonnet Tempo SATA ExpressCard/34 Review
Post Rating:
I have a Macbook Pro and do all my development on it. That being said, I need to have 1 or 2 Virtual Machines open pretty much all the time, 1 acting as a web server, the other as a Media/FTP server. With the small 120GB hard drive on the laptop, my space gets eaten up pretty fast when using the local HD, not to mention the slow 5400 RPM transfer rate does slow down overall performance.So what I did to resolve this was purchase a Sonnet Tempo SATA ExpressCard/34 card. It has 2 SATA ports on it and I have it running to my Nexstar3 enclosure via the eSATA on the back of it.
It is nice because the drive inside the enclosure is a 7200 RPM Maxtor with I believe a 16GB cache, so its definitely faster then the drive I have in the Macbook.
Not only has this device saved me about 30GB of space on my Laptop's hard drive, but my virtual machines (running Parallels 4.0), run much faster, load/suspend/shut down all seem to have improvements, and overall responsiveness seems to be better. In addition it's nice to have my virtual machines saved on an external drive so I can just plug my external into my desktop PC when I do my scheduled backups. Much faster then going over the network.
The SATA ports on the card can run at 3.0gb/s, you probably won't get that fast unless your doing some hardcore video editing or data processing, but it's good to know you have that capability.
The support at Sonnet Tech is always great, very responsive, and good support. They respond to your questions as fast as like 5-10 minutes from sending them a request.
If you are looking for a way to save hard drive space on my laptop while increasing VM performance, I highly recommend this card.
Product Link
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