eSATA only 29MB/S ???!

MustangSVT

Lifer
Oct 7, 2000
11,554
12
81
D:

I purchased a acasis usb3.0/esata case and 2tb 5400rpm 3.5" drive seagate drive. started to back up files from my laptop.

But I'm only getting 29MB/s transfer speed. is this normal?

Do I need to update drivers ?? I thought this was usb2.0 speeds...

update: rebooted and now im getting 59MB/s is this about average for esata?

now its slowly dropping, now at 35MB/s.... mmmm
 
Last edited:

DarkRogue

Golden Member
Dec 25, 2007
1,243
3
76
Model number of the HDD? How much data is already on the drive?

It could be that you're reaching the limits of a very full and slow HDD.

Alternatively, it could be a bad eSATA cable. I had that happen before.
I never really noticed until I tried to benchmark it, and I noticed that one of my two enclosures was consistently slower than the other. Swapped in a new eSATA cable and all was well.

Goes without saying, but, hopefully you're actually plugged into eSATA and not USB?
 
Feb 25, 2011
16,983
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What's the HD in your laptop? Very likely it's slower than the external, and is the actual bottleneck.

A really-quite-fast laptop HD will do, tops, 80 MB/s. For a low/midrange one from a couple years ago, topping out at 40 wouldn't have been abnormal. Read errors due to bad sectors, etc., will slow it down too.

For very long transfers, USB 2 seems to average a measly 25 MB/s, regardless of any theoretical maximums.
 

Magic Carpet

Diamond Member
Oct 2, 2011
3,477
233
106
D:

I purchased a acasis usb3.0/esata case and 2tb 5400rpm 3.5" drive seagate drive. started to back up files from my laptop.

But I'm only getting 29MB/s transfer speed. is this normal?

Do I need to update drivers ?? I thought this was usb2.0 speeds...

update: rebooted and now im getting 59MB/s is this about average for esata?

now its slowly dropping, now at 35MB/s.... mmmm
It's normal. If you want faster speeds, hook up that laptop hdd to your desktop and do SATA to SATA transfer instead.
 

hhhd1

Senior member
Apr 8, 2012
667
3
71
my old 5400 rpm drive was barely able to reach 20~30mb/s, could be just hd limitation.
 

tweakboy

Diamond Member
Jan 3, 2010
9,517
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www.hammiestudios.com
Nope something is wrong, it should be about 100mbps as fast as a internal drive.

You getting low scores can mean a lot of things. Maybe you should install latest mobo drivers and what not. Also try defragging that drive ,,,, 29mbps is super slow. anyhow let us know.. gl
 

philipma1957

Golden Member
Jan 8, 2012
1,714
0
76
here is the bottom line 2.5 inch 5400 rpm hdds are slow at the beginning of an empty one you can get 65 to 75 mbs max. near the end 40mbs is common. you stated a max of 59 and it dropped to 35 deeper into the copy. not too far off. Also remember tiny files copy slowly . So if you have a lot of small files speeds of 30 to 40 mbs are not uncommon. By small files under 16k.

A great way to test speeds is to copy photos. 2 megabyte photos will copy much more quickly then 10k photos.

make a test photo file up and test. 2000 4 megabyte photos is about 8gb . it will copy very fast. 800,000 10k files is about the same 8gb it will copy much slower.
 
Feb 25, 2011
16,983
1,616
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Nope something is wrong, it should be about 100mbps as fast as a internal drive.

The only "laptop" hard drives capable of topping 100MB/sec are the Velociraptors, WD Blacks, Momentus XT, maybe some of the high end Momentus series, and SSDs.

Most of them are doing well to hit half that in a sequential transfer.
 

sm625

Diamond Member
May 6, 2011
8,172
137
106
It depends on what you are copying. I have a folder on my computer that is 5 GB and 10000 files and it takes like 15 minutes to copy. Yes that is 5 MB/s. I have another folder that is full of large movie files and it copies at a rate of 35-50MB/s.
 

tweakboy

Diamond Member
Jan 3, 2010
9,517
2
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www.hammiestudios.com
It depends on what you are copying. I have a folder on my computer that is 5 GB and 10000 files and it takes like 15 minutes to copy. Yes that is 5 MB/s. I have another folder that is full of large movie files and it copies at a rate of 35-50MB/s.


I just CDM my external eSATA conn ,,,,,, Im getting 100mbps or avg 95mbps

It is defragged by couple diff apps... :thumbsup:
 

exdeath

Lifer
Jan 29, 2004
13,679
10
81
The only "laptop" hard drives capable of topping 100MB/sec are the Velociraptors, WD Blacks, Momentus XT, maybe some of the high end Momentus series, and SSDs.

Most of them are doing well to hit half that in a sequential transfer.

Seagate GoFlex Pro 7200 RPM 2.5" drives will do 100 MB/sec over USB 3.0
 

exdeath

Lifer
Jan 29, 2004
13,679
10
81
make a test photo file up and test. 2000 4 megabyte photos is about 8gb . it will copy very fast. 800,000 10k files is about the same 8gb it will copy much slower.

And this is why hard drives suck and need to go the way of the floppy, VHS tape, and punch card.

Computer can move 50 GB/sec, it shouldn't take an hour to move 8 GB of random data to a storage device.
 

biostud

Lifer
Feb 27, 2003
19,485
6,549
136
Also depends on the file types you're copying, small or large files. I usually get ~50-70mbps on my 7200rpm WD black 500Gb e-sata drive.
 

Makaveli

Diamond Member
Feb 8, 2002
4,917
1,506
136
D:

I purchased a acasis usb3.0/esata case and 2tb 5400rpm 3.5" drive seagate drive. started to back up files from my laptop.

But I'm only getting 29MB/s transfer speed. is this normal?

Do I need to update drivers ?? I thought this was usb2.0 speeds...

update: rebooted and now im getting 59MB/s is this about average for esata?

now its slowly dropping, now at 35MB/s.... mmmm

As everyone has suggested your bottlenecks are the hard drives not the Esata interface.

60mb is not average for Esata I easily hit 100MB/s on my ESATA drive but i'm copying to another 7200rpm drive internally in my system.
 

MustangSVT

Lifer
Oct 7, 2000
11,554
12
81
The laptop is about a year and half old and uses slow drive i guess.

on my desktop, I was doing anywhere between 60~110mb/s so I guess its the laptop hdd :)

thanx guys. odd.. for the longest time I just used usb2.0 and was fine.. now that I used esata, I want something much faster :D
 

Emulex

Diamond Member
Jan 28, 2001
9,759
1
71
rpm is meaningless for sequential i/o - areal density and RPM count and it's zone-based.

every drive i've used in 2.0 -> 3.0 went up in speed - i don't use 5400rpm for anything since filling a 3TB 5400rpm drive is far slower. Wish they made 10K RPM external drives for D2D