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    Why is my eSATA drive so slow?

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by akwit, Oct 5, 2009.

  1. akwit

    akwit Notebook Deity

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    I may be doing something wrong here:

    I am currently transfering my music library to an external drive using/which is an infosafe/startech external enclosure (via eSATA).

    I am only getting a 20-25 mb/sec transfer rate.

    Is that normal?

    I thought it was easily over 100 mb/sec?
     
    akwit, Oct 5, 2009
    #1
  2. newsposter

    newsposter Notebook Virtuoso

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    what are the media transfer rates of the origin and destination hard drives?

    A (potentially) fast interface can't make a slow drive run faster.

    Or, what else is the host machine doing?
     
    newsposter, Oct 5, 2009
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  3. akwit

    akwit Notebook Deity

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    The origin is the 250gb hard drive in my laptop.
    The destination is another 250gb hd, now in an eSATA capable enclosure.

    I dont think I understand your questions/comments.
     
    akwit, Oct 5, 2009
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  4. Xtt

    Xtt Notebook Consultant

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    What speed are the hard drives? 5400 RPM? 7200 RPM?
     
    Xtt, Oct 5, 2009
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  5. newsposter

    newsposter Notebook Virtuoso

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    what is the max sustained rate at which your hard drives can send and/or receive data? RPM is irrelevant to this question.

    I don't care about the relative effects RPM may have on other situations.

    The important thing here is how fast the drives can push and pull data, not the mechanics of how they do it.
     
    newsposter, Oct 5, 2009
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  6. akwit

    akwit Notebook Deity

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    I have no clue.

    How does one find that information?
     
    akwit, Oct 5, 2009
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  7. Duct Tape Dude

    Duct Tape Dude Duct Tape Dude

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    Google HDTune--good free program.

    Also, what kind of files are you getting 20-25MB/s with? Smaller files (documents, smaller music files) will give you slower speeds while larger files (movies, etc) will give you more continuous faster speeds.
     
    Duct Tape Dude, Oct 5, 2009
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  8. newsposter

    newsposter Notebook Virtuoso

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    in the mean time...

    make sure that your mobo drivers are up to current levels. The chipset, disk controllers, net adapters, all have specific drivers.
     
    newsposter, Oct 6, 2009
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  9. weinter

    weinter /dev/null

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    FYI the 300mbps advertised is the max bandwidth, the true rate are very much slower.
    The 300mbps is theoretical and NOBODY on mechanical harddisk can reach such speeds.
    If the data size is small 50-70mbps is reachable with burst speed but NOT average speeds.
    Remember your harddisk need to seek the data, queue the data and finally write it.
    25mbps is rather normal.
    Moreover your laptop harddisk is probably 5400RPM with 8MB of buffer cache hence 25mbps is NORMAL.
    If you have a SATA 1 Controller it will also be slow as the max theoretical rate is reduced to 150mbps.
     
    weinter, Oct 6, 2009
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  10. John Ratsey

    John Ratsey Moderately inquisitive Super Moderator

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    In addition to the benchmarking of the drive, try timing the transfer of a very big file (eg an ISO file).

    As already noted, small files have an additional processing overhead.

    Also make sure that the drive policy is set to Optimize for Performance with write caching enabled.

    John
     
    John Ratsey, Oct 6, 2009
    #10