Data Transfer Speeds over eSATA

[capreppy]

The laptop in sig (Asus G71V-Q1) has an eSATA port. I've got a couple of external drives that I take with me on the road.

I have a 320GB 7200RPM WD Scorpio Drive in a Vantec NexStar 3 Enclosure.

The HDDs in the laptop are the same as the one in the enclosure.

I also have a Seagate Barracude 7200.11 1.5GB 720 RPM in a Thermaltake 3.5" External Enclosure.

When transferring data, I never get more than 6 to 10 MB / second transfer rates. There are times when I need to transfer data to someone else's drive and I get up to 20MB / second transfer rates.

I normally transfer larger (700MB+) files. Should I expect higher transfer rates? Is there anything I can do to increase transfer speeds?

 

[SockMan!]

eSATA will have the same speed as internal SATA. Something must be screwed up with your drives, cabling, or enclosure.

 

[Cyant]

DMA transfer is properly enabled or is it running in PIO mode maybe?

 

[capreppy]

What are the major factors that would affect overall transfer speed?

CPU Usage
DIsk Usage (if I'm torrenting to the drive or a VM is on the drive and active)
Memory Usage

 

[capreppy]

Ok. I tried looking up DMA and PIO. I'm not knowledgeable enough to figure this out.

Where should I be looking at to figure this out. I tried google, but got a lot of info on Windows 2000 and XP, but frankly not a whole lot of info on Vista