FirmTek SeriTek/2ME4-E four-port eSATA card for Mac Pro

I’ve been testing the new FirmTek SeriTek/2ME4-E 4-port eSATA card, and I’m impressed: not only is performance as good as my long-time favorite Sonnet Tempo E4P, the card has performed flawlessly with Snow Leopard booting into either the 32-bit or 64-bit kernel. I have two of them installed in my Mac Pro Nehalem [review] now for testing. You can get the SeriTek/2ME4-E at OWC.

Kudos to FirmTek for being ahead of the game (the Sonnet E4P doesn’t support the 64-bit kernel as yet). Not only that, the FirmTek card is tiny and seems to be a power miser. The only feature missing that I wish it had were drilled holes on the card to accept cables like the Sonnet eSATA locking cables (for a mechanically secure connection).

I won’t give the FirmTEk SeriTek/2ME4-E my blessing until I’ve beaten it up with some more testing (eight 2TB drives connected with 8 cables on two cards), but at this point it looks very promising; no quirks is a rarity with eSATA cards and so far no quirks.

You should be able to purchase the SeriTek/2ME4-E soon at OWC. I like the FirmTek SeriTek/2EN2 dual bay enclosure and the 2eEN4 4-bay enclosure for my particular uses, but a wide variety of external enclosures support eSATA, including the OWC quad-interface models (Firewire 400/800, eSATA, USB) such as the recently reviewed QX2.