Customer Reviews

Syba SD-EXPC34-1S2 JMB Chipset 1x e-SATA Ports, 34mm, Up to 3.0Gb/s ExpressCard

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This ExpressCard works perfectly with my old 2.16 GHz MBP and my husband's new 2.6 GHz model, with any of our four eSATA enclosures, 2.5" and 3.5". No drivers needed, no problems. Cost less than half the price of my FirmTek Seritek ExpressCard, which has required two firmware updates to work properly. Based on two months of use I highly recommend this card.

Product worked as advertised on my MacBook pro without the need to install any additional software. My only gripe is that after backing up my system, (3 hours use), the sticker label on the card began peeling. I just pulled the sticker off, but testing adhesive against heat output should be a no brainer.

Several problems with this, ended up returning it:
*Would not install correctly. The drivers on the CD included didn't install at all and the drivers on the website didn't work.
*Poor instructions. The tiny little instruction sheet, which only includes Windows instructions, referred to non-existent files and folders on the CD, which seems to include drivers for every product made by the company, not just this one.
*Caused other problems. After trying to install it, my PC wouldn't shutdown or boot properly until I rebooted into safe mode (after having to turn off the power to get it to shut down) and running system restore to undo the driver install attempts.
*Poor customer service. Before returning it, I emailed the company. I received one reply telling me to do things I had already tried several times, then they never replied to my second email.

Is not reliable for any sustained work in Vista (32 up-to-date), and Win 7 (32 and 64 up-to-date). I wanted this to work and gave it more than several hours of trials. Installed various versions of JMB36X driver from JMicron site (a trip in itself). Had partial successes occasionally when following just the right sequence on install, turn off, reboot, turn on, etc. The right sequence? Not sure, seemed variable. Occasionally got as far as reading and writing folders and files to eSATA-ed drives (NTFS). ALWAYS got to a point where reading/writing became endlessly long and finally failed, usually disabling the device until re-installed.

Consigning this device to the trash bin and buying one that uses Silicon Image chip, SIL3132.

The card works fine with my Macbook Pro. Just plug and go. The transfer speed is incredible and everything I was hoping for. It is a shame Apple is dropping ExpressCard slots from the 15-inch notebooks.

The two downsides to this particular card are that it is too easy to dislodge the ESATA cable from the card, and the card itself doesn't 'latch' into the notebook very well. But it's easy to work around this: just don't move things around while the card is in use.

Worth a note: I was never able to get this card to work with Windows XP running on Parallels on the same Macbook Pro. Windows never sees the card even with the driver installed. This is most likely an issue with the emulation and not the fault of the card. I have not had a chance to try it with XP via VMware Fusion.

I bought this eSATA express card adapter for connecting an external hard drive to my Toshiba L305-S5909 laptop. I bought a new Gforce Megadisk 1TB Fantom drive with triple USB-2, Firewire, eSATA interface support. The Fantom drive worked on eSATA with my desktop computer which has a native eSATA port. The Fantom drive worked on my Toshiba laptop, running with Vista-64 via the USB-2 interface, but using the Best Connectivity Syba SD-EXPC34-152 JMB Chipset 1x eSATA adapter, nothing I could do would cause the Toshiba to recognize the Fantom drive. I have an Iomega external hard drive for my other Windows XP desktop computer, and the Syba adapter did allow my Toshiba to recognize the Iomega drive.

I was about to return the Fantom drive, but before I did, I bought a DX-ESATL Dynex 2-port eSATA II ExpressCard Adapter. This adapter came with a mini-CD to install the correct driver. I installed it on my Toshiba, and connected my Fantom drive to the Toshiba, and everything works perfectly.

So the Syba unit seems to have a less robust interface, at least for a Vista-64 machine.

I bought this adapter for use in my 2006-ish MacBook Pro.
The packaging conspicuously leaves out OSX from its list of supported operating systems, but for 16 bucks it's worth a try right?
It works perfectly with OSX 10.6.8, just remember the hard drive needs to be powered on before connecting the card to the computer.
I can't say anything about it on windows, it comes with a driver cd that I didn't need, and there's not much more to say.
Again, 16 bucks. Seriously buy this.

I bought this for my old PC which did not have an eSATA port. IF you, too, need this card for an eSATA external drive, but are thinking about just using a USB connection instead, BUY THIS CARD. My speed tests between my PC and my Cavalry Storage CADA-SA2 Series 2 TB USB / eSATA 2-bay RAID Personal Disk Array CADA002SA2 - Includes eSATA Kit proved that transferring files WAS 18 TIMES FASTER WITH THIS CARD THAN WITH A USB CONNECTION.

I bought this product a few months ago and it worked perfectly out of the box and was recognized immediately by my MacBook Pro. I noticed; however, as time wore on the speed of the transfers slowly dropped and eventually the hard drive that was connected to this card would no longer mount. Thinking it was the drive, I tried repairing it using Disk Utility which came back with a clean bill of health. So then I proceeded to use a FW800 cord instead and instantly the drive was mounted and accessible from the MBP. It's clear, the quality control and durability of these cards is lacking and, despite the low price, I wouldn't recommend purchasing this item if you plan on eSata frequently.

This drive allowed me plug in an eSATA drive and boot from a mac partition without issue. I was careful with the hardware and it never froze my computer.