E-SATA vs Gigabit external

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Digital Viper-X-

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Well I'm lookin at setting up a 4 drive external enclosure, and i'm going with either E-SATA or, something with it's own management and gigabit

Questions are

are there any e-sata external enc that house 4 drives, have some sort of cooling, and can connect either 1 sata cable? or is it always 4(without raid) thats really the only downfall I see of an E-SATA setup, is that I'd have to use 4 cables for 4 drives.

and for gigabit, what do you guys rec? also going to use 4 drives, also looking for something that's cooled, and what would the performance diff be for usb vs gigabit
 
don't know of any enclosures like that of the top of my head, but if you want 4 x esata you will need 4 cables or 1 multilane cable. As for performance of diff interfaces it would be:
esata>firewire>usb>gigabit lan
 
Gigabit can often be faster than Firewire 400 and USB 2, but it's highly variable and requires decent hardware (not necessarily expensive, but not dirt cheap either) to perform well.

eSATA should generally be the fastest, being closest to drive speed with little overhead.

Some enclosures would come with SATA port multiplier support / bundles. I'm not sure how port multiplier systems perform in practice. Multi-lane connections could be much faster in theory.
 
I've seen external SATA enclosures that have a built-in port mutliplier. Those only need one cable.

As for performance of diff interfaces it would be:
esata>firewire>usb>gigabit lan
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eSATA is definitely the fastest, but gigE takes second place, not last. I regularly do gigE transfers of large files at over 95MB/sec between RAID arrays on my home network. That's not a special case, one-time speed, but a real-world, practical one. USB transfers very rarely reach 40MB/sec, in my experience. I don't use Firewire, but Firewire 800 offers less bandwidth than gigE, so I would expect it to be a little slower.
 
ok what kind of gigabit equipment do you use to get 95mb/s? thats almost max possible speed, i use intel pcie gigabit nics, netgear switch and 9000 jumbo frames and i never seen over 60mb/s
 
My Linux boxes use Intel pro/1000 adapters. The secret to good speed is to not use Windows file sharing stuff. Well-tuned NFS isn' t too bad. netcat is fastest, it's what i use to sling around multi-gigabyte video. Jumbo frames are overrated.
 
xenotype said:
Have I got a solution for you.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817332013
80mm fan, 4 bays internally, SATA. One e-SATA to host port

I have the IDE version which does 4x PATA over USB2.0 and im loving it. Get yourself a 20 foot long USB cable, and stash the sucker in a closet or under the bed. Good storage, good value, and a fan to boot. And no, I dont work for them.
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the enclosure is ok but in order to be 1 esata to host it puts all drives in jbod or raid so it will show up as 1 drive not 4, if thats ok with OP then it looks like a good solution.
 
Bones said:
My Linux boxes use Intel pro/1000 adapters. The secret to good speed is to not use Windows file sharing stuff. Well-tuned NFS isn' t too bad. netcat is fastest, it's what i use to sling around multi-gigabyte video. Jumbo frames are overrated.
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hmm maybe i'll setup nfs, i've been using ftp to transfer data between my freebsd and linux boxes.
 
You need fast storage on both ends of the transfer (RAID). If you really want to see what your network can do, pipe a large dd from /dev/zero, through netcat, to another network host's /dev/null. That will show you the best speed you'll be able to get, without your storage being a factor.
 
ya i forgot my download box is single drive now, it used to be raid 0, but i went with single 500gb when i build new box. I'll try doing dd through netcat to see what i can get, thanx for the tip.
 
axan said:
ya i forgot my download box is single drive now, it used to be raid 0, but i went with single 500gb when i build new box. I'll try doing dd through netcat to see what i can get, thanx for the tip.
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Also, on Windows you can do: copy filename NUL
same thing as /dev/null

Doing that, I can get 78MB/sec on a single file and 120MB/sec on two concurrent files.
 
whats JBOD :p? that actually looks like a wicked price / performance setup with that $178 but a single 80mm fan I don't think can cool enough for 4 drives >_>

how the hell do you guys get 70+mb/s :p? I get 25-30mb/s max on my gigabit network using a dlink gigabit switch
 
Digital Viper-X- said:
whats JBOD :p? that actually looks like a wicked price / performance setup with that $178 but a single 80mm fan I don't think can cool enough for 4 drives >_>

how the hell do you guys get 70+mb/s :p? I get 25-30mb/s max on my gigabit network using a dlink gigabit switch
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jbod = just a bunch of disks, basically it takes any number of any size drives and makes 1 volume out of it.

like bones said windows file sharing/samba is kinda slow for transfering files over gigabit, ftp, nfs, netcat can be a lot faster
 
Dew said:
Also, on Windows you can do: copy filename NUL
same thing as /dev/null

Doing that, I can get 78MB/sec on a single file and 120MB/sec on two concurrent files.
Click to expand...

I think something went wrong with your test - 120MB/sec is equal to the theoretical gigE bandwidth. TCP overhead alone significantly reduces this, and using the CIFS protocol for file transfer with your copy command will degrade it even further. Are you sure that copy did a network transfer from the remote machine to local NUL?

how about this?
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Well, it looks nice... how about you buy it, then tell us how it worked out? :D
 
Hmm Im thinking a different route now, how about setting up a cheap pc with windows home server? and having it on my gigabit switch

what is the average speed you guys seem to get over gigabit?
my dlink d5100 or w/e it's called usually 25mb/s, kinda slow no? but then again thats over 100feet of cat 6 cable.
 
Digital Viper-X- said:
Hmm Im thinking a different route now, how about setting up a cheap pc with windows home server? and having it on my gigabit switch

what is the average speed you guys seem to get over gigabit?
my dlink d5100 or w/e it's called usually 25mb/s, kinda slow no? but then again thats over 100feet of cat 6 cable.
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Gigabit ethernet is plenty fast, as long as all the equipment is Gig-E. (routers, switches, cables, cards, etc). I can't quote a speed rating, but its fast. With simple computers reaching prices below a solid NAS unit, building a home server is an efficient and cost effective solution, drop in a SATA controller, boost up the PSU and you can cram in as many drives as you wish.

One note, however, Windows Home Server OS is not sold (AFAIK) separately from a PC. You have to purchase a system that has it pre-installed.
 
well I've decided :p I'm gonna build an htpc, in a regular case stacked behind my tv, with all my storage in there :p

i'll let u guys know the performance!

btw would a 100ft cat5e or cat6 cable slow down gigabit performance *alot* ?
 
Speaking of setting up network shares for speed, iSCSI works very well. However do any of the enclosures designed for "home use" support iSCSI? If not you can probably build a decent "enclosure" for pretty cheap and run OpenNAS on it which does support iSCSI.
 
Digital Viper-X- said:
well I've decided :p I'm gonna build an htpc, in a regular case stacked behind my tv, with all my storage in there :p

i'll let u guys know the performance!

btw would a 100ft cat5e or cat6 cable slow down gigabit performance *alot* ?
Click to expand...

It shouldnt slow down gigabit performance at all. Its well within spec.
 
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