Home > Consumer Reviews > Vantec UGT-ST300 2-Port eSATA II-150 PCI Host Card

This has one internal SATA socket and one external ESATA socket. It runs at 1.5 Gbps maximum (compared to 3 Gbps for some motherboard interfaces). Still, that's 3X of USB2 and 2X of Firewire 800.

I bought an ULTRA external enclosure that had ESATA and it worked so well that I decided to get this interface card for my old PC.

I'm pleased with it.

I first tried the Cables Unlimited card in the PCIe x 1 slot on the motherboard, but my Dell E510 with XP SP3 and a Pentium 4 froze on start up. I almost gave up but decided to look some more. The instructions with the Vantec card were much better and it uses the normal PCI slot. I was dreading start up, but it continued like a charm!!! If you are looking to add an internal SATA and external eSata capability to your computer, this is the way to go.

I bought 2 of these cards to add eSata to a Sun X4100 server I use at home. The slots in the Sun box only support the short height cards, so these just fit using the shorter brackets that come with them. I added a pair of Lacie 1 TB eSata drives and created a ZFS mirror for full redundancy of controllers and drives. I've been running Solaris 10 x86 (10/2008) with no problems for about 4 months now.

have 3 of these... none are hot-swap in 2003 server (or sbs2003), but they do work. there is a rosewill sold cheaper that is EXACTLY the same card.