Addonics CardBus Adapter: Bringing eSATA to Notebooks

Connecting Serial ATA Drives To Your Notebook

Selecting the right interface for storage applications has always been a difficult task. If you go for a flexible interface you might sacrifice performance, and vice versa. Universal Serial Bus (USB 2.0) is the most common interface and it works with almost every computer and operating system - but it does not provide sufficient bandwidth for demanding applications.

Spending a lot of money for customized solutions usually isn't an option. For example, Firewire, especially 1394b, is based on an isochronous protocol to support real-time data transfer (necessary for video and audio streams) and it is clearly faster than USB 2.0 (up to 800 Mb/s). But only few computers offer the necessary interface, and the fast Firewire-800 protocol is hardly available for notebooks.

ESATA, or External Serial ATA, seems to be the perfect solution, since it is fast enough (1.5 or 3 Gb/s bandwidth) and allows device hot-plugging, which means that you can attach and remove devices without having to restart your system. More and moremid-tier to high-end motherboards are equipped with at least one eSATA port, and an increasing number of desktop PCs is equipped with eSATA today. The only shortcoming has been the deployment of eSATA for the mobile segment, since mainstream notebooks do not carry any eSATA ports yet.

Addonics thus seeks to meet demand for eSATA adapters that connect high-speed storage to your notebook. Since eSATA is an extension of conventional SATA, it is very easy to implement. Current notebooks are also no longer inferior to desktops performance wise, as they can now offer dual-core processors, 2+ GB of memory and powerful graphics. The only missing block has been high-performance storage. Welcome the ABCBDAR5-2e by Addonics, which is a CardBus adapter for eSATA with RAID support.