Customer Reviews

Tempo 4CH Sata II Pcie Controller Ext E4P Multiplier

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

 

 

I'm using this card in a Mac Pro. Performance is fine, and the card does pass SMART data and temperature to OSX (several other cards that I tried don't). Unfortunately, drives connected to this card never spin down. Doesn't matter if the computer has sat idle for hours (with the internal, and Firewire drives having spun down), the eSATA drives keep spinning. Same thing when the computer is put to sleep, or when the drives are unmounted from the desktop.

Sonnet tech support confirmed that the card blocks HD sleep commands.

It's not a deal-breaker, but still a disappointment.

I've been using the E4P for over a year in a Mac Quad G5 system, controlling both a small single-drive enclosure and a 10-drive RAID system.

I was a bit hesitant to go with a port-multiplier system, thinking that it would adversely affect performance. But both disk subsystems perform extremely well, with the RAID able to sustain uncompressed 1080/60i HDTV without a problem. You could probably get a bit more performance by not using the port multiplier, but then you are limited in the number of drives you can connect, since the densest SATA controller I know of is just 8 ports.

I'm satisfied enough with this that I'm ordering another to install into a new Mac Pro (Intel-based) system.

This was easy to install and worked perfectly right out of the box on my Mac Pro (early 08).

Product was easy to install and works as prescribed. I am running a 5 drive enclosure and it works great. The only thing I have not figured out yet is how to display the drives that are attached during bootup. Not a show stopper however. Will purchase the product again.

This card was super easy to install and it worked immediately. I have a 2011 8-core Mac Pro. The only problem....if your computer goes to sleep, it won't wake up unless you reboot. There's a compatibility issue with the Mac sleep function and the way the card operates, which I confirmed with their support people. Basically if you use the sleep mode, you're SOL.

This card works well for fixed installations. But if you intend to use eSATA docks where the target drives come and go the Mac OS X drivers are buggy. The effect of powering down or unplugging a drive connected via this card is that an internal data structure in the OS kernel is left dangling which causes a several minute blue-screen delay when logging out or shutting down.

I'm a software developer and have sent several bug reports with loads of diagnostics but after 4 months nothing has been done.

Obviously, if I'd known their software was broken I would not have purchased this product.

I have used this in my Mac pro, it is very reliable and extremely easy to install and use.

Sonnet makes great products, I own many sonnet products and find them to be of great build quality and reliability.

I have used other e-sata cards and had trouble in Leopard Mac OSX. This card has been working great