Transfer speeds?

[capreppy]

Storage noobie

Vista Ultimate x64 (Asus laptop in sig)

HDD1: Laptop Internal 320GB WD Black (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136280)
HDD2: Enclosed Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148337) in this Thermaltake Max 4 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817145029) enclosure

Connection is via eSATA thru Iogear Expresscard (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16839139001)

Transferring movies (12 x 700MB each), at what speed should I see Vista transfer these at?

[Lazn_Work]

the speed that it is capable of.. you tell us

[capreppy]

ok. maybe I didn't ask the correct question.

Windows Explorer indicates it is transferring files a 19MB/sec. Should I expect it to be faster? If so how much faster?

[Lazn_Work]

well the raw numbers of the WD should be in the 30-60MB/s range, the Seagate in the 100+MB/s range, the express card should not be a bottleneck.. (though the reviews on newegg for that one aren't great.. however take those with a grain of salt)

So if you had the OS installed to a different drive, and had no antivirus running, and were copying in the fastest way possible, you should get 30-60MB/s depending on where on the WD's platters you are writing.

But since your OS is installed on that drive, who knows.. It depends on if anything else is going on or accessing that drive, if you have antivirus, or background defrags, or other downloads going on, or if your drivers aren't behaving etc etc

[capreppy]

The internal WD is a data drive. Files are being written to it (it's a bittorrent data drive). I am transferring completed files to the 1.5TB Seagate

Anti-virus is turned on for the drive, but background defrags I believe is turned off.

It is interesing that when a file transfer is started sometimes it'll start at 40 to 50MB/sec, but settles in at 19 (or so).

If I were copying from a HDD2 to a similar HDD via eSATA should I expect 100MB/s transfer speeds? I don't know that I've ever seen that

[JRS]

That express card is possibly a bottleneck. It is not unusual for eSata interfaces that are on some "gadget" to be primarily a physical interface and be limited by the paths that the data still must pass through. In other words, just because a device has an eSata port, does not mean it will give you typical sata performance.

I have an external enclosure with a sata port on it - internally it accepts a sata HD or an IDE drive. Even for a sata drive, it's max transfer rate is coincidently identical to what I would get with an IDE drive internally connected to a motherboard.

It is possible that your eSata express card may be an eSata interface, but goes through a USB port internally, or connects to the PCI Bus of your laptop's motherboard.

I believe hard drive transfer performance linearly declines depending on how full the drive(s) are. Two empty sata drives (say two seagate 1.5TB) both connected directly to a motherboard via sata should start a transfer at well over 100MB/s (actually cache will have the initial number much higher). But it won't take long before that slows down to <100. If one of those drives is 3/4 full, it could drop to something like 30 or 40MB/s.

[capreppy]

Some expresscards ARE basically USB ports, but some are not. I believe this to be one that isn't a USB based device.

The information above was very useful and I thank you for the info.

[nitrobass24]

I would say the express card is definately the bottleneck.
I have one in my laptop and its not any better.

[Lazn_Work]

Well AntiVirus will definitely slow it down.. Just how much is hard to know.

You could try the drives in other systems to see how they perform and to eliminate possible suspects.

[capreppy]

Ok. It seems I got the information I needed.

I believe there are probably a few factors in the speeds I am seeing:
- Anti Virus software
- Current available space on the HDDs
- other Read / Writes that are going on

The speed I am seeing may be just what it is capable off.

Thanks everyone for helping me understand a little more today :)