eSATA vs HD speed

[dknguyen]

I got a question here...

ie eSATA more than double the speed of two harddrives? I'm just wondering if a single eSATA port is used to access two harddrives in an enclosure if a speed hit will be taken.

 

[dknguyen]

Wiki says...yes?

Serial ATA - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"While even the fastest conventional hard disk drives can barely saturate the original SATA 1.5 Gbit/s bandwidth, Intel's Solid State Disk drives are close to saturating the SATA 3 Gbit/s limit at 250 MB/s net read speed"

 

[blueroomelectronics]

If it's speed you're after you can't beat an SSD

 

[dknguyen]

This is for storage so SSD won't work. I like to run hash checks that can take more than ten hours so I'm wondering whether to get a more convenient 2 HD enclosure that has one eSATA port, or two single HD enclosures with one eSATA port each. I don't want to have a dual HD enclosure with one eSATA port only to have the port be the bottleneck when I can get two separates enclosures with one eSATA port each. THat's one reason I always read from one HD but write the results to another.

mmmm love eSATA after living with transferring 500 gigs at a time over USB2.0.

 

[MrAl]

Hi,

Wow, 500 gigs must take ages with USB

The thing that bothers me about regular SATA however is that so far all the
systems i have tested for the copy file function have come up short of a
good IDE system. I hesitate to get an SATA drive now.

 

[dknguyen]

How has it come up short against IDE? WHen I got my new PC, I didn't have much of a choice. All the mobos were SATA and all the HDs were SATA. eSATA was the main advantage for me. Plus...I hated running ackward wide ribbon cables everywhere.

I think it's awesome.

 

[Speakerguy]

I like it too, if only because the cables are so much better than the old IDE ones.

 

[Krumlink]

May be off topic, but USB 3.0 will boast speeds of up to 5Gb/s. Faster than eSATA!

 

[dknguyen]

Not faster than SATA 6.0 lol

 

[Krumlink]

Most HDD's I have seen can only get up to about 1.6Gb/s

 

[Krumlink]

Not faster than SATA 6.0 lol

Smaller connector though

 

[MrAl]

How has it [SATA] come up short against IDE? WHen I got my new PC, I didn't have much of a choice. All the mobos were SATA and all the HDs were SATA. eSATA was the main advantage for me. Plus...I hated running ackward wide ribbon cables everywhere.

I think it's awesome.

Hi again,


Could it be because for a copy file operation
the file has to be both read from the disk and then written back
to the disk, and that takes more time with a serial device?
It has to read and write the files plus both directory entries.
I dont really know for sure though. All i know for sure is that
the SATA systems i have tested come in at roughly one half
of the speed of the reference IDE system, and these were all
relatively recent systems (within 2 years ago).

What i did do is make a disk speed test program and i ask
people to test their systems and send me the results so i can
compare a more wider base of systems. The program only
takes about 15 seconds to run and the results display out on
screen. If anyone is interested in this program, please let me
know. I would be interested to see the results from more
systems so i can make a good comparison between the real
life SATA drives (not just the spec's printed on web sites)
and real life IDE drives.

 

[Krumlink]

SATA drives are faster than IDE. Just check the read/write results of various sata hdd compared to old slow ide.

 

[dknguyen]

What's the program.

 

[MrAl]

Hi again,

It's simply called "CopyTest.exe" and i had written it many years ago.
If you would like a copy i can email you one.
I'd be very interested to hear your results too though if you dont mind.

Krumlink:
So far i havent been able to find one SATA drive faster than a standard IDE drive
when doing file copies. That's what was so surprising to me.