Siig quality sucks

I needed some fast disk space for working on my photos and after some research settled on a pair of Western Digital My Book Premium ES 500GB drives and a Siig eSATA ExpressCard/34 card to connect them to my Mac Book Pro.

So far it’s been pretty much a disaster. First the good: the WD drives work great using their USB 2.0 interfaces. If I only had to connect a single drive, this would be fine. But USB is a shared bus so for multiple drives it sorta sucks if you’re doing heavy disk access.

Hence, I got a Siig SC-SAEE12-S1 eSATA card for the Mac Book Pro. Basically you get two high speed eSATA ports, both of which are much faster then the USB 2.0 spec. This is in theory this gives me 1TB of disk and no compromise speed. Sounds great… not so good in practice.

The first card I got was DOA. Didn’t recognize either drive at all. I ended up RMA’ing the card and got a second one.

The replacement recognizes the drives just fine (seems to have issues with plug-n-play though), but within a few minutes just “locks up” and you can’t access the drive anymore. This turned out to be really bad when my Adobe Lightroom database of 1,600+ photos was corrupted and I had to re-import them. Could of been worse, I could of lost hours and hours of work.

So now I’ve opened another support ticket with Siig. My guess is that this is a driver issue, but it’s really amazing that this product was released with the obvious and major quality bugs. Of course so far, support has been pretty good- not really quick, but the RMA process was painless and fast. It should be interesting to see how they deal with this issue.