Coolgear Internal to External eSATA 4 Port PCI Bracket

I used this in conjunction with two dual bay Startech docks Startech eSATA USB to SATA Hard Drive Docking Station for Dual 2.5 or 3.5-Inch HDD USB 2.0 External Hard Drive Enclosure SATADOCK22UE to externalize some of my SATA drives. Note that newer desktops (eg. HP Pavillion Elite series) no longer have orb set screws, and rely heavily on motherboard connectors to stabilize the orbs on the backplane, and thus it may be difficult to securely anchor an adapter like this one. I had to tweak mine and wedge it in between some shielding on the backplane. Otherwise, you run the risk of pushing the adpapter onto the mobo (and possibly shorting out somethig) when you are attaching the cables. This problem is not the fault of the manufacturer. Once securely attached, the adapter worked with no problems. Used with the docks, I can test and configure raid arrays, backup and clone drives, etc. without having to open my system, and with great performance. The system doesn't know or care whether these drives are internal or external.

Works as expected at SATA-III speeds, solid build quality, and 4-ports is useful considering the number of SATA ports motherboards have these days. Not much to say, kinda hard to get a SATA->eSATA adapter wrong but I'm amazed at how long it took me to sift through the vendor junk on Amazon before finding this one.-Matt

Simple solution to add an eSATA port(s) to a PC case. It does what it is supposed to do.

This product and it's matching adapter along with 8 standard 18 inch SATA cables (4 to connect the bracket to 4 available SATA ports on the motherboard in the PC and 4 to connect the adapter to the 4 SATA6 hard drives in the SATA RAID Silo.) solved a need I had to retrofit an older 4 hard drive SCSI RAID Silo to a 4 hard drive SATA6 RAID Silo and this solution allowed me to come out of my PC as eSATA via 4 standard 6 foot eSATA cables and connect to my newly created eSATA6 RAID 0 Silo.There's no electronics in the bracket or the adapter to auto-negotiate or slow the data rates down which is good so this bracket and the adapter and standard eSATA cables will pass SATA/SATA1/SATA1.5 = 150 Mb/sec or SATA2 = 300 Mb/sec or SATA3/6 = 6 Gb/sec - all with no problem. I also bought 2 dual Y adapters to convert the older Molex hard drive power connectors in the SATA RAID Silo to SATA hard drive power connectors from Radio Shack. The job looks like a professional or factory installation.The seller was very responsive and helpful when I discovered I ordered two of these brackets but I really needed one bracket for the PC and the matching adapter for the RAID Silo. They did the exchange and did not charge me shipping charges the second time to send me the adapter and were very nice about everything.Retrofit costs:Older 4 hard drive SCSI RAID Silo on Craig's List $15.00, Internal to External eSATA 4 Port PCI Bracket and matching Internal to External eSATA 4 port Adapter with shipping $44.95, 8 standard 18 inch SATA cables with shipping $10.80, 4 standard 6 foot eSATA cables with shipping $23.99 and 2 Molex to SATA dual Y power adapters $12.99 Total: $107.73 - Not bad! Now the cost of the four WD Caviar Black, 750 GB, SATA6, 64 MB Cache, 7,200 RPM hard drives inside the SATA6 RAID 0 Silo is a totally different story. Fortunately I got mine before the Thailand floods. :-)

The eSATA connections don't make consistent connections. This isn't necessarily only affecting this product, but more a design flaw of eSATA connections, none of which are designed to really lock into place, nor hold the weight of the cables that attempt to make connections. I found they were even less reliable with the weight of the cables with a desktop case in the standard upright orientation. When I originally had the case laying on its side, these were much more reliable.These may be satisfactory for much shorter eSATA cable connections, or for the short term.Original review: I use these with Adaptec ASR-78165 controllers so that I can have many hard drives hooked up to desktop PC #1 that are actually housed in desktop PC #2. I use Windows Storage Spaces set up so that two hard drives can fail at any time and I won't lose any data.

It's a simple device to add external SATA connections by connecting to internal unused SATA ports. I have not been successful getting it to work on my PC. Documentation says only 3GB SATA connections supported. Most modern hard drives support 6GB SATA so this item is a bit dated.

Worked perfectly without additional drivers on my Win Server 2013 Ent installation. Allows pass-through of port multipliers in my external enclosure. Not all cards do, so be sure to check before buying an eSata card if you need that functionality. For a single drive it doesn't matter.

I can only surmise these are only advertised at SATA II 3.0Gb/s because the pass-through circuitry is unshielded; but testing with an external RAID shows it easily saturates and delivers most of the SATA III 6.0Gb/s one would expect.When I think of the number of computers I struggled with installing bulky, cheaply made 1x and 2x PCI SATA to eSATA adapters, and then compare to this unit, I am very sad I'd never discovered this before.