Hi. I've recently purchased a very highly spec'd Dell XPS 1530 laptop. I intend to use the laptop's expresscard 54 slot to edit HDV via esata on a LaCie 1TB SATA II 3GB/sec 32MB cache 7200rpm external drive (RAID 0).

I'll be capturing via the Firewire 400 port directly onto the esata drive.

There are a lot of esata expresscards out there. Mostly in the $40 to $70 range. Some with two esata ports. But I also see a FASTA-1ex SATA Express Card by Caldigit which costs over $100 and with only 1 port!

Can anyone steer me in the right direction on this? I want to make sure I get the 3GB/sec transfer speed, but without spending unnecessary money.

My source material is coming from a JVC HD GY110 Camcorder and also Sony HVR V1E Camcorder.

XPS 1530 Laptop specs:
CORE 2 DUO T9500 2.6GHz, 800, 6M
Display 15.4" WXGA (1280 x 800) with Truelife
Memory Dual Channel 4.0GB (2 x 2048) 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
Hard Drive: 320GB Free Fall Sensor (7200rpm)
Graphics Card 256MB NVIDIA Ge Force Go 8600M GT
Firewire 400 I/O

Thanks in advance,

Seamus.

I'm using an eSATA expresscard adapter from Addonics Technologies - Making Data Storage Simple (http://www.addonics.com). These run about $50, and come in two flavors, both with 2 ports. One flavor includes a RAID controller, the other flavor does not. Both work very well. I would recommend the cheaper one(without the RAID contoller) and run an external RAID array using a Port Multiplier.

Thanks Bill. I wasn't able to get one shipped from Addonics. I'm in Ireland. But I got a similar one from the UK.

Seamus.