Heeter

Hi all,

I just picked up an external harddrive unit. It holds 2 x 1TB HD's that I put in myself. I configured it as a mirrored raid setup. I plugged it into my onboard eSATA plugin.

I am transferring files over to it, but I cannot bet it past 45MB/s, eSATA wa supposed to hit the 3GB/s mark.

My mobo is an ASUS M4A78Plus with Win7 RC, and my external HD is a Vantec Nexstar MX.

Is there I am not setting up properly? Is it Win7 itself? Or is this normal?


Thanks

Heeter

American Zombie

Will still be limited to whatever the slowest drive is just like ram does if you have different speed sticks.

eSATA is the same speed as SATA II.

Heeter

Thanks, AZ.

What is the data transfer rate of SATA & SATAII? If a HD is built to SATA II standards (3GB/s), then it should be transferring data at the specific rate described, no?

I'm confused.

Thanks

Heeter

American Zombie

3 GB/s is the theoretical speed.
Sustained speed is going to be a lot less.

Download a drive speed testing app like HD Tach and see what your speeds are.

My result:

Attached Thumbnails

 

bmclaughlin807

The only drives that really come close to saturating SATA II are high end solid state drives... you're not going to get anywhere near max with anything else.

Heeter

Hey Thanks Guys.

Didn't know that burst speed and sustained speed were totally different. Never thought of that before.

I have two different generations of terabyte Seagate SATA II drives running in this eSATA RAID unit.

So the slower one (7200.11) is "up to 3Gb/s burst speed, 106MB/s sustained speed" what a huge difference!!!

And another thing that I noticed. SATA II/eSATA is "3Gb/s", not "3GB/s". I only noticed the later.

Learned something new again today.

Thanks, bm & AZ.


Heeter

PS, forgot to mention, AZ, HDtach doesn't want to work with Win7.

Tweakfiend

I have an Abit IP Pro motherboard that does not recognise an E Sata externally connected H/D in Windows 7 64 bit at all, works in other versions of Windows @ max speed with no problems.
May be work in progess issue ?

American Zombie

Try XP mode compatibility and run as administrator.
I did not have to choose run as admin as I run on the admin account renamed to my name.

Heeter

Good point, Tweakfiend.

Heeter

Heeter

UPDATE:

I disabled S.M.A.R.T. for the eSATA in my BIOS, and now my data transfer speed has gone from a consistent 45MB/s to 75MB/s.

I will continue playing around and seeing if I can crank it up some more.

Win7 doesn't seem to be as cranky as well using the eSATA with the S.M.A.R.T. turned off. It was complaining about bad disks and asking me to start a backup right away. Overall performance was taking a noticeable hit.


Heeter

ZeroHour

Btw that shouldnt moan unless its detected possible issues. I would strongly recommend you backup as well as in my experience you only get up to a couple of months before the drive does crash. If you had a nforce chip it can be ignored to the most part since there is a known bug but otherwise yeh you should listen to it.

Are you getting 75MB/s reading or writing?
Writing is a slower action by a fair bit. How are you getting the measurement? from the w7 dialogue?
If so it has times where acuracy goes banannas but I dont know if eSATA suffers with the issue.

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Heeter

Thanks for your input.

Since this is a RAID mirror setup in this external eSATA enclosure, I have 2 drives in there now. SMART does not detect any problems when I am testing each drive by itself on bootup, only when they are RAIDed together in this enclosure.

I did use the dialogue, and that was the speed that I am measuring 297 GIGs of files writing to the enclosure, test writing 20 gigs at a time.

Another eSATA issue is now that when I leave the machine idling for a certain period, the eSATA gets disconnected from the computer. The only way to fix is to reboot. I have tried enabling/ disabling sleep and tried logging off/on, to no avail.

I have since then stopped using the eSATA and am now using the USB2.0 connector. It is much more considerably slower in data transfer (as in <10MB/s sustained speeds), but the stability is worth it to me right now. I am going to re-enable the SMART in the BIOS as it did not complain with the RAID'ed enclosure connected with the USB2.0 interface.

I still don't know which is the culprit, the mobo, or Win7, or a combination of both.


Heeter

dreamliner77

1) Sounds like something is tripping SMART. I had all kinds of SMART problems with a 7200.11 drive.
2) Is one the the drive a "green" drive or "low power" or do you have turn hdd's off in power options on? This could cause the drive to get "lost" when it powers down. I have finicky esata drives. One enclosure needs to be turned on and then connected, the other one needs to be connected and then powered on.

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