Sonnet Tempo SATA E2P - 2 Port PCI-Express eSATA Card with Port Multiplier

This is a PCI-Express card, which is the expansion card used in Apple Workstations from the PowerMac G5 Dual-Core onwards. These cards are only compatible with PCI-Express enabled computers, and will not work in older PCI or PCI-X based systems.

The Sonnet E2P is an affordable PCI-Express 2 port eSATA card with port multiplier functionality, giving you a good-value flexible card to control a wide range of eSATA devices.

Please note however that Sonnet do not recommend this card for high-performance RAID applications, so if you are planning to control a large array of disks the Sonnet E4P is a more suitable card.

This PCI-Express Card is only suitable for PowerMac G5 Dual Core machines and later, for earlier machines, see the Sonnet Tempo SATA X4P.

For more information on eSATA, please see our eSATA FAQ.

Alternative products are the Sonnet E4P, which is a high-performance card designed to control large arrays of RAIDed disks, and for the Mac Pro the Sonnet eSata Cable Extender, which is a simple cable solution which links from the two spare internal SATA connectors (the Mac Pro has 6 in total) to give 2 eSATA ports externally - excellent for controlling up to two individual disks.

Please note, there are a number of warnings for this card that may make it unsuitable for some users, please read carefully:

• Sonnet do not recommend this card for "high performance RAID configurations" - in practice we only recommend this card if you want to control multiple drives externally in a non-RAID configuration, for a high performance card look at the Sonnet E4P, and to control one or two individual eSATA disks on a Mac Pro look at the Sonnet eSata Cable Extender.
• There are know issues using this card with certain enclosures with a combined USB2/eSATA bridge. The following warning is taken from Sonnet's website:

Please note the following warning from Sonnet: While some customers have successfully used external hard drives with dual USB 2.0/eSATA interfaces, these products (based on the Oxford Semiconductor OXU931DS storage controller chip) exhibit underlying errors that prevent them from being fully compatible with this Sonnet product under Mac OS X. Kernel panics occurring when the drive is connected, and the drive not being recognized by the operating system are known issues. These drives include, but are not limited to:

Sonnet's Fusion D400Q and R400Q quad-interface storage systems are not affected by these issues, and are fully supported.