Expresscard eSATA controllers that work?

[Ergaster]

I got one of those Expresscard/34 power-over-eSATA/USB combo cards that come with a full-connector notebook drive cable:

I/O Crest - Syba sy-exp50028 that uses the JMB360 chip

The driver install is confusing enough, but I did find the right one. It's supposed to show up as a SCSI controller. There's some other RAID drivers, and Vista/7 have some AHCI driver they want to use, but the driver on the CD is what I use.

Thing is, I have not managed to get any significant data across it, on 2 very different laptops, using XPsp3, Vista, and Win7. I can get directories and file properties, but if I try copying anything big, I get a burst that looks real promising, then nothing....and eventually the drive resets with a clank.

Also, the card is making the card slot hot, but I popped the case off and ran it, and nothing on the board is that warm. It's like the thing is causing mainboard components to heat up.

I looked for solder bridges and damage inside, but nothing obvious. Pass-through USB works, I think. So it's now a $20 aux power jack for the Y cable on my USB2 enclosure.

Are the JMB360 boards generally this trouble-prone?

Any known-good identical-function Expresscards out there? I liked the idea of just popping a drive on the end of a cable and hot-plugging for temporary high-bandwidth access to it.

[jaclaz]

Our Mac friends seem like not too happy about them:

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/feedback/express34_card_reports.html

but the reports are quite controversial.

jaclaz