External ESATA to SATA cardbus/PCMCIA

I have a Fujitsu N3010 laptop that has 2 cardbus slots. I just bought a 500GB, 7200rpm, External drive (Cavalry from Buy.com). It has both USB 2.0 and ESATA interface. I have a couple of older cardbus/PCMCIA adapters that are SATA I. The cable that came with the external drive is a ESATA male-male cable. My question is about the maximum speed I can expect through the cardbus. Am I correct, that no matter what type of adapter I plug in to the cardbus slot, the theoretical, maximum interface speed will be only be 1.5gbps? Is it true that the 3 Gbps speeds would require an Express card slot?

Am I better off spending about $10 for a Esata male to SATA male cable, or getting a new ESATA adapter for my laptop? At what cable length does the signal start to degrade?

Thanks for whatever help you can offer on these questions.

-c

 

You can get a new adaptor or a new cable, it will not make a difference. The speed of the drive is faster than the bandwidth of the pcmcia interface.
PCMCIA, correct me if I'm wrong is 400mega bits/second. The bandwidth of USB is 480megabits/second.
Your harddrive will do about 60-70megabytes/second, which is significantly faster than the cardbus/pcmcia bandwidth.

Either option you have chosen will work, just make sure that your pcmcia/sata adpator works before buying a cable.

K-TRON

 

SATA cable for less cost and faster speed.

 

That's not right, that's OLD cardbus support (which actually should be about 500Mb/s) older cards were about 150Mb/s, but this card he's talking about is likely able to support verbose (DWord) 32bit cardbus since it's an SATA card, and so should brush up near 1/2 PCIe throughput (one way) at about 1,100M b/s or 133M B/s which is under the MAX of SATA150, and really the limit will be the drive anyways, which will struggle to reach 100MB/s let alone that throughput.

http://www.pcmcia.org/pccard.htm

I think the theoretical max of the interface was put at about 1,400Mb/s, I remember reading that a while back that may be what you're thinking of.

Anywhoo SATA/eSATA is the way to go even via PCMCIA, USB and FireWire drag behind, especially USB for latency issues and I/O overhead. Even FireWire800 would likely still be outperformed as I doubt the I/O speed would suffer that greatly due to interface change.

 

USB 2.0 may be 480Mb/s on paper, but I have never seen an external USB HDD get above around 25MB/s in practice. See the attached HDTune results for WD2500BEVS, internal, eSATA and USB (the Newlink enclosure has both connections).

John

 

I will be the first to admit I am more than a little challenged when it comes to deciphering technical specs. This is what I have found for the Theoretical Maximum throughput for the cardbus interface.

The differences between SATA and ESATA connectors were described as follows;

Here's a picture of the connector on the cards that I have. They sure look like an "L" to me.




Based on the above, I think I will go for a ESATA cardbus adapter. The cost may be a few bucks more, but at least I won't have to obsess over compatibility issues and performance hits. Meanwhile, I'll use the USB interface and see if I even need the Esata speeds.

 

Which is which?

If its, listed in the order you write, that shows eSATA stuck at 25MB/s, which makes me say WTF is wrong with the controller?

Obviously that middle one is bottlenecked somehow and by the looks of it I would've picked the middle one as USB, since my external WD is just around mid 30MB/s.

 

Yeah it mainly depends on what you expect from it, USB will work fine I have 3 hooked up at home and 1 on Firewire, I had an eSATA RAID card from addonics (which came with an eSATA/SATA converter dongle you might be interested in find on its own) hooked up to my FreeAgentPro but I had to get rid of it because it protruded so much and blocked my reader slot and made accessing the PCMCIA a hassle.

Speed between USB and others really only bugs me when I'm moving very large photo or video files and I'm in a hurry to get on to other things or want to access them straight from archive instead of moving them to primary first. If you want to work straight off the drive eSATA is definitely the way to go, if you're more focused on price than anything USB will likely be fine, but IMO it's worth getting the eSATA support.

 

I guess that there is slow and there is SLOW. Unless I have not set this up correctly this result is just plain wacky. (technical term) Any idea what could be causing the drive to report as running so slow? These results are from an empty drive on the USB interface. The second thumbnail is from my internal Hitachi 100GB drive

 

Wow, that almost looks like USB 1.1 throughput.
Try swapping usb connectors.
You aren't running through a slow USB hub are you?

 

It looks like your system has USB 1.1

I would get that pcmcia/expresscard adaptor. It will take all night to transfer 1gb over USB 1.1.

K-TRON

 

The laptop has USB 2.0. I had the drive plugged directly into the USB port on the laptop. I noticed that when I changed USB ports, I got the message that it could run faster on a high speed port. I checked on all the IRQs and saw that I have a ton of stuff sharing IRQ 11.

Could that be the problem? Is it okay to change the USB controller to a different, unused IRQ, like 2 or 7? I am out of my depths on this sort of stuff so any advice would help me out.
Thanks,

 

I found the problem. Weird driver setup. Updated the driver and speed got back to what seems to be "normal" for an external USB drives, based on the results John got with his drive on USB.

Thanks to everyone that offered info and help. Without this group I would never have known, or figured out, that there was a problem with my USB 2.0 connection.