Can you tell us how was the harddrive connected to the system? PCI card or was connected to the internal SATA connector?

Also does this allow hot-swappable capabilities? I have skimmed thru the whole artcile and doubt if I came across either of the issues.

inside the USB enclosure was a UATA disk - does this enclosure also house a UATA disk and it translates to SATA externally or its just possible to go SATA all the way.
an inside picture would have solved the mistery for me :)

Very interesting but i am more interest in 2.5" and 1.8".

Sata is very speedy but i know 0% of people that have external Sata equiped Mobos.

Wow -- I just went to the download page of the STLab website to see if I could download a manual that might provide a little more info (such as hot swapability, etc). Every single link on their download page is either completely dead or leads to their server's "file not found" page. It doesn't exactly instill confidence in their support.

Too bad they don't have SATA2 interface for notebook computers (yet)... :(

just so we're on all on the same playing field, why not do the test again including firewire HDD enclosures?

any place i can buy that in canada????

Excellent article! I just put together a similar setup for my laptop because of multi-track audio recording. The internal HD solutions (7,200 rpm hd's) and USB/Firewire solutions didn't give me the speed I wanted. I used a Raptor with an SATA external enclosure to an SATA pc card and was amazed at the results! Thanks for the confirming stats!!!!!