P5E-WS: ESATA

[mis3]

I just bought a Antec MX-1 hard disk enclosure to house a WD50000AAKS. When I rebooted my PC, I saw that the Marvel driver was installed during boot time.

I copied 21GB from my local drive to this external drive and it took 6 minutes. Not even close to the 3 GB/S as per SATA-2 standard. When I connected the HDD to a USB-2 port, the same data would take 14 minutes to copy.

The ESATA transfer rate does not even come close to the SATA standard of 3 GB/S. Is this a problem with the Marvel driver? If I use a ESATA bracket to connect the external HDD to one of the 6 internal SATA ports, would this improve the transfer rate?

 

[engiNURD]

No single drive performs at the max capability of the entire bus.

21GB/6min = 21504MB/3600sec = 5.9MB/s

I must say, that is pretty slow. That must have been a bunch of smaller files as opposed to a few large ones, or even a single large file.

FYI, there should be no performance difference if you plugged that drive straight into an internal SATA header as opposed to the eSATA header.

BTW, here are some benchmarks of SATA drives that I own...

Avg Transfer Rate, Access Time: HDD info, Price I paid (except for raptor - twas a gift)
**note, these figures come from HDTune, a synthetic benchmark for HDDs.

112MB/s, 13.2ms: RAID0 'cuda's, 600GB total, $120 (ICH9R on P35-DS3R)
78MB/s, 08.2ms: WD Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB, $160
76MB/s, 13.7ms: WD Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS 750GB, $150
72MB/s, 15.4ms: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250410AS 250GB, $65
68MB/s, 13.3ms: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS 320GB, $60
65MB/s, 13.7ms: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS 320GB, $80
65MB/s, 13.2ms: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3300620AS 300GB, $60
63MB/s, 13.4ms: WD Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS 500GB, $100
62MB/s, 15.3ms: Samsung HD501LJ 500GB, $105
52MB/s, 14.0ms: WD Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB, $70

 

[Old Hippie]

The ESATA transfer rate does not even come close to the SATA standard of 3 GB/S.

eSATA = SATA, it doesn't matter. Technically, it's all the same. Your internal SATA drives aren't coming close to the max. either.

If ya think the interface in the external drive is slowing you down, run a drive speed test with your WD50000AAKS connected internally, and compare with the external results. Should let ya know if there's a problem.

 

[mis3]

I use HD Tune 2.54 to benchmark my 2 drives:

HD Tune: WDC WD7500AAKS-00RBA Benchmark (SATA)

Transfer Rate Minimum : 48.4 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 97.1 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 76.8 MB/sec
Access Time : 13.8 ms
Burst Rate : 124.4 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 1.1%

HD Tune: WDC WD5000AAKS-22TMA Benchmark (ESATA)

Transfer Rate Minimum : 39.0 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 81.9 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 66.4 MB/sec
Access Time : 13.4 ms
Burst Rate : 99.9 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 1.6%

The internal SATA port (South Bridge as opposed to Marvell) is faster. Maybe I should use a ESATA bracket to connect the external drive to one of these SATA ports.