I am copying 834GB from a 2TB FAT32 SATA drive to a 1TB HFS+ SATA Drive on my MacBook Pro, and the speed is impressive, around 100MB/s, 4X faster than USB 2.0 real-world speed

Beware that these drivers are beta, without any warranty, and should not be considered at this point as production drivers, but still this is a solution for those like me that have a MacBook Pro w/ ExpressCard eSATA SIL3132 controller (real MacBook Pro have ExpressCards, other are just MacBook in disguise )

Go to Silicon Image download page for SIL3132 Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Drivers (second one)

PS: Finally was 90MB/s thouput for hard-drive copy on eSATA with 25$ eSATA ExpressCard/34! 3X time faster than fastest USB 2.0 hard-drives!

It’s probably not the best performer on all bench, and probably the more expensive 2.5″ hard drive, but it’s the fastest where it counts: on multitasking situation or when launching multiple software at once, or performing multiple task such importing in LightRoom 2 while surfing the web, …

Anyway, as the internal 2.5″ Hitachi 500GB 5400rpm is probably the worst 500GB 2.5″ drive ever (usual on Apple computers despite the high tag price), it’s performance-level will be probably better in any circumstance, and in XBench itshow, even if this does not test multitaking abilities.

More later this week-end