What speeds should I expect from my eSata drive?

Im moving about 200gigs of info from my laptop to an external drive via eSata and am only getting about 10mb/second transfer speeds.

Isnt that a bit slow?

 

I can get ~70MB when moving stuff via eSATA with a Travelstar 7k500.

However, if there are lots of small files then 10MB might not be unreasonable.

 

10 is too slow IMO. I get over 20 MB/sec over USB no matter how small the files are!! eSATA should be much faster!

 

Any ideas on possible causes for the slow speeds?

Is it even possible to connect this thing incorrectly?

 

Since most eSata also has USB, can you try that to see if it is just the cabling or the eSata port itself that is the problem ?

BTW, one thing I don't quite understand is that eSata is supposed to be just Sata using a different cable so it should behave exactly like internal Sata performance wise. But almost all benchmark I have seen shown it to be noticeablly slower. Anyone has an explanation for that ?

 

^I would suppose bottleneck through however the port is connected.


Speed for 65,536 4KB text files:
.

 

This may sound like a stupid question, but can I connect this thing by using USB for power and sata for connection simultaneouly or do I have to use the DC conncetion?

Meaning, will my computer automatically choose the faster method?

 

This is not true. I have a Welland ME-580J dual bay RAID enclosure with eSATA interface. There are 2 WD Caviar Green 2TB drives in it, working in RAID0 mode. Transfer speed is 180MB/s - 130MB/s (max - min). That is exactly what I would expect from these 2 drives in RAID0 if they were connected to a normal SATA interface.

 

Great. So something is wrong about those benchmark I saw then.

As I said, I would expect eSata should be exactly the same as internal but was puzzled by the benchmarks I saw.

Or in other words, if there is any eSata that doesn't show the same performance characteristic as internal, something is wrong.

 

whether you use usb power or dc power doesn't matter, usb power is mainly for convenience.

 

eSATA is 3Gbps so expect upto 300MBps It will handle any hardrive speeds. Some SSDs will be caped. USB 2.0 is capped at 30 MBps if your lucky

My hitachi 1 TB 7200rpm gets 140-70 MBps depending on location of the platter

 

It also depends on your eSATA. Some eSATA ports are capped at SATA I speeds (1.5 Gbps), although most modern ones are almost certainly SATA II (3 Gbps).

 

all eSATA ports are SATA II..they didn't make them until after SATA II

EDIT:unless it is a jerry rigged one on a desktop.

 

well ... is this connected via build in eSata port, or is it an add-on eSata card ? Then, if it's an add-on card - is it an Expresscard slot or is it a PCMCIA slot ?

- first case - eSata should be equal speed to the internal Sata, so 3GB/s most likely (SATA2)
- second case - Expresscard x1 works at 2.5GB/s, and the later version x2 works at 5GB/s ... thought using Sata2 interface afterwords would limit at 3GB/s as well.
- third case - if it's a PCMCIA card then it will be limited to ~70MB/s max.

in either way, 10MB/s is very slow ... even USB gives you ~30MB/s max. So if you're using an add-on card than you may want to check your drivers.

 

No. eSATA came in both 1.5 Gbps and 3.0 Gbps standards (source here, direct from the Serial ATA International Organization).

Regardless, yes, it is true that 10 MB/s seems rather low. Have you tried transferring a single very large file to see how fast it goes, or a CDM or HDTune on the drive?

 

I have AKE 1 esata port expresscard with jmicron 36x chip. Enclosure i-stor is302 also with jmicron bridge esata-usb2.0 jm20316. New HDD Samsung HD204UI 2TB 5400rpm. Speed topped near 100MB/sec.

http://s008.radikal.ru/i304/1102/bd/2439231d3432.jpg

 

Also i found a post/thread in here saying HDTune can be inaccurate and its best to try atleast 2 benchmarks

 

10MBps is probably fine.

Transfer speeds are largely determined by the size / type of files you are transferring.

A single large 4GB defragmented file on hard drive being transferred from HDD --> eSATA --> HDD should max out at around 60MBps - 70MBps. That type of transfer is called a sequential transfer, and maxes out the sequential read / write speeds of the source / destination hard drives.

However, transferring that same 4GB of data broken up across several small files (e.g. 200,000 files that are 20KB each = 4GB total) will be MUCH slower than 60MBps - 70MBps. This is called a random read / write pattern, and will max out at the random read / write speeds of the source / destination hard drives.

You are probably somewhere inbetween the two extreme examples I used (1*4GB file vs 200k*20KB file), which results in your 10MBps. This is perfectly fine.

Namaiki was the only person in this thread that correctly identified this as the cause. Anybody can try this for themselves... copy one large 4GB file, and see your transfer rates hit 60MBps - 70MBps. Then, copy 10,000's of tiny files that add up to 4GB total space, and watch how your transfer rates are significantly lower than 60MBps - 70MBps.