I am going to connect a eSATA drive to my Hacintosh. What is the best eSATA adaptor around? PCIe X1 preferred, but ordinary PCI adaptor is also aceptable.

Thanks

By the way, is eSATA actually the same thing as SATA? Or they are two different interfaces? Tried to search for an answer, but couldn't find that.

eSATA is an external plug interface. You need a External Disk With eSata connection and an eSATA PCI/PCIe card to plug to your motherboard.
My Lacie PCIe card work natively on 10.4.8 /9 /10 /11 but not on Leopard for the moment...

. . *all* these PCIe hosts use the Sil3132; for the OK [& cheap] one I use see signature: spec here

Just to clarify things a bit...it's the eSATA and SATA connections that are different. If your pci card has eSATA connectors and your drive has an SATA connection, a simple eSATA to SATA cable will do the trick quite well. Same thing for the opposite case.

For my part, I have both of the two kinds of cards : An eSATA to SATA card (witch was given with my mother board : SATA Bracket) and a LaCie eSATA PCIe card (Sil 3132).

- The SATA Bracket works in 32 and 64 bits modes. But no hotpluging
- The eSATA PCIe works only in 32 bits mode beceause of the Silicon Image's driver. In 32 bits no hotpluging nether.
It used to work in the fisrt times i installed OSx86 on an AMD 64 X2 with a Gygabyte motherboard (nForce4 controller) and JaS 10.4.8 (32 bits).

I found a trick that is supposed to make hotpluging works on Sil 3132 in 64 bits mode and using the Silicon Image's driver for OS X. But it didn't worked for me as my card isn't recognised by the Silicon Image application of the windows controls pannel. See http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=24254 <<-- ooZberg 's post.

The cord length limit to eSata is 6ft or 2m

not all eSata enclosures work properly (nexstar, i'm looking at _you_), you may have to limit the HD speed to 1.5gb via jumper