USB vs. eSata

I have a MacAlly external hard drive and I have my own Seagate 750GB drive in there. It us dual interface USB and eSATA and I have been using it as a USB drive but just recently bought an eSATA express card.

I did four write tests and the results weren't exactly what I was expecting. The times were only twice as short. I expected it to be much faster. Here are my results:

USB:

1.18 GB MP3 files - 1:18
7.46 GB Pictures - 8:28
1.18 GB DMG - 1:16
4.1 GB MOV File - 4:26

eSATA

1.18 GB MP3 files - 0:37
7.46 GB Pictures - 4:22
1.18 GB DMG - 0:32
4.1 GB MOV File - 1:59

Does it have to do with so many small files in the first two tests? Is it because write times are slower than reads? Any ideas?

Just because the bus interface has a certain amount of bandwidth, doesn't mean the drive mechanism can actually saturate it. Most hard drives won't come close to the maximum transfer rate of the bus, even at 10K RPM. You had more than a 50% increase in speed, I'd say that's excellent.

cwa107 said:

Just because the bus interface has a certain amount of bandwidth, doesn't mean the drive mechanism can actually saturate it. Most hard drives won't come close to the maximum transfer rate of the bus, even at 10K RPM. You had more than a 50% increase in speed, I'd say that's excellent.

Click to expand...

Well I realize you will never hit actual speeds. I agree that twice as fast is a great improvement. I just thought that since theoretical speeds are about 7 times faster that I would have at least seen a 4x improvement.

Of course, if I had two internal SATA drives I could test that to see what kind of speeds I get, since that would be a fair comparison.

Having worked on servers with high-end SCSI3 UW based drive arrays configured in RAID5, I'd say those transfer rates are respectable for a single 7200RPM SATA drive, particularly with lots of little small files. I would expect to see better transfer rates for the single large files. It might be a function of the filesystem too - are the drives formatted HFS+?

cwa107 said:

Having worked on servers with high-end SCSI3 UW based drive arrays configured in RAID5, I'd say those transfer rates are respectable for a single 7200RPM SATA drive, particularly with lots of little small files. I would expect to see better transfer rates for the single large files. It might be a function of the filesystem too - are the drives formatted HFS+?

Click to expand...

Yes, they are both HFS+. To be honest, it's not a big deal. I was just looking for someone to say that was expected so I didn't worry it was a crappy ExpressCard/cable/enclosure/hard drive, etc.

Fireware800 vs. eSata

Hello to all!

Just I buy one LaCie d2 Quadra Hard Drive 1.5TB (eSata cable included),with LaCie SATA II ExpressCard 34.

I allreay have another LaCie External Disk Extreme 1TB conected by FireWire 800, when I test the speed on both by drop a file into the hard disk this is what I got...

2.3Gb ISO file - 1:38 -eSata---------Bytes/Second->around 30/33MB
2.3Gb ISO file - 1:40 -FireWire800-Bytes/Second->around 28/29MB

I was thinking the eSata ExpressCard will give me more speed..!!

I have installed the last Mac plugins from Lacie included on the CD with the Card,same from LaCie Web (SiI3132_1.1.9u_Sil_Pkg.pkg) from 2008 July.

So what's going on ?. Could be the cable ?

Any help will be appreciated

Thanks
MacBookPro SantaRosa
2.4Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo

Hi I was doing the check with Xbench :


LaCie BigDisk Extreme+ ---TEST--------by FireWire 800 cable----

Results 99.97
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.5 (9F33)
Physical RAM 4096 MB
Model MacBookPro3,1
Drive Type LaCie BigDisk Extreme+
User Interface Test 231.88
Elements 231.88 1.06 Krefresh/sec
Disk Test 63.72
Sequential 78.99
Uncached Write 72.38 44.44 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 97.77 55.32 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 49.94 14.61 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 152.23 76.51 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 53.40
Uncached Write 21.60 2.29 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 85.81 27.47 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 101.25 0.72 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 141.20 26.20 MB/sec [256K blocks]


LaCie d2Next-Quadra-----TEST---- eSata cable by ExpressCard LaCie---

Results 111.32
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.5 (9F33)
Physical RAM 4096 MB
Model MacBookPro3,1
Drive Type LaCie d2Next-Quadra
User Interface Test 340.34
Elements 340.34 1.56 Krefresh/sec
Disk Test 66.54
Sequential 115.68
Uncached Write 129.52 79.53 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 163.64 92.59 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 62.30 18.23 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 213.07 107.09 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 46.70
Uncached Write 15.22 1.61 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 206.27 66.03 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 110.15 0.78 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 165.79 30.76 MB/sec [256K blocks]



Any ideas ??
Thanks

Installing again the ExpressCard driver's and shut down computer and external hard disk's.

The same test :

2.3 GB file - 1:18 -eSata---------Bytes/Second->around 33/33MB
2.3 GB file - 1:20 -FireWare800-Bytes/Second->around 30/32MB