the idea of the express card is really interesting… i'll keep an eye on it.
I did some testing using an eSATA ExpressCard on an older laptop, with the incoming data via a Tableau T35es and the outgoing data using a generic brand eSATA toaster (external "enclosure") under Vista with FTK Imager like 2.6.1. Whilst it wasn't as fast as I get on my main forensic workstation acquiring from the T35es, it was significantly faster than USB source acquisition. This was a couple of months ago.
Depending how much data is on the drive, ie 20GB data on a 500GB drive, I use the Tableau write blocker, 800 firewire in and esata out, expresscard. I use ghost32, in Windows, to copy the allocated to the destination drive and usually finish quickly. If you don't need a forensic clone why move the unallocated? Jim
I've imaged hundreds, perhaps close to 1k drives, and I dislike USB, too many buffer errors causing me to start over.
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MarkG
While I'm not a huge fan of using a bootable USB myself, if you don't have a USB CD-ROM available, then the bootable USB works quite well.. particularly with netbooks which don't have a built-in CD…