eSata write speed: Intel ICH10R 100mb/s, Jmicron 15mb/s.

[California Roll]

Wasn't sure whether to post this here or in Mobos, so here goes.

Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R

It has 2 sata controllers:

Intel ICH10R x 6 ports
Gigabyte (Jmicron) GBB36X x 2 ports

I have both set to AHCI mode in Bios for hot swap capability. I don't use raid.

The ICH10R has a known problem of not being able to hot swap esata drives. Well, I think you can hot swap but you don't get the "safely remove hardware" icon like with USB flash drives.

The Jmicron doesn't have this problem. I turn on a sata drive in enclosure and I get the "safely remove hardware" icon. I can swap esata drives with ease and no problems.

The problem is the write speed. I tested the same drive and enclosure on both controllers. Intel gives me constant 100mb/s write on a 8gb size file.

Same file on the Jmicron controller and it starts at 100mb/s, for a couple seconds. Then it continuously slows down till it's about 15mb/s.

Is this normal?

One note, in my Device Manager:

ATA Channel 0
ATA Channel 1
Intel(R) ICH10R SATA AHCI Controller
JMB36X Standard Dual Channel PCIE IDE Controller

[edit: above is under IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers. Under "Storage controllers" it shows:
ABH9Q5KN IDE Controller
Gigabyte GBB36X Controller
Microsoft iSCSI Initator]

Does this look weird?

Thanks for any help!

 

[alcoholbob]

I'm pretty sure those two Jmicron 36x ports are just for out-of-box RAID support. The actual controller is terrible for single drive use as its pretty bandwidth strapped. I have about 30% less performance with the 363 SATA controller vs the ICH10R in AHCI mode.

 

[metalmania]

Not normal at all. Set the jumper on the drive to "SATA 1", it might help.

 

[California Roll]

So I reinstalled the Jmicron drivers from the Gigabyte product page. Rebooted and tried it again and whoa, 100mb/s writes. Awesome. Tried it on both ports and looks good. Shut off the external drive and tried it again later that night. I'm back to 15mb/s. I really can't figure this out.

I'll try setting the drive to SATA 1 instead of SATA 2 and see if that helps.

 

[Absolution75]

I've got the same problem. Doing robocopy /MIR on my some of my directories will create long pauses (30 seconds or longer) using the Jmicron controller.


A simple solution, if possible would be to use the ICH10R controller. Make sure you install the latest storage matrix controller software/driver (its in the same package). Windows won't detect the drive when you plug it in (for me it doesn't anyway, I assume that's what you mean by eSata problems). When I go into the storage matrix console and manually scan for plug and play devices, it pops up and gets good performance.

As far as removing the drive, you can always just uninstall it via device manager and remove it. That's about as safe as you can get. I just make sure I'm not transfering anything when I remove it.

 

[California Roll]

Originally posted by: Absolution75
I've got the same problem. Doing robocopy /MIR on my some of my directories will create long pauses (30 seconds or longer) using the Jmicron controller.


A simple solution, if possible would be to use the ICH10R controller. Make sure you install the latest storage matrix controller software/driver (its in the same package). Windows won't detect the drive when you plug it in (for me it doesn't anyway, I assume that's what you mean by eSata problems). When I go into the storage matrix console and manually scan for plug and play devices, it pops up and gets good performance.

As far as removing the drive, you can always just uninstall it via device manager and remove it. That's about as safe as you can get. I just make sure I'm not transfering anything when I remove it.

Yeah, I have the Intel matrix controller installed. Recognizing external drives isn't a problem, it always picks it up. My only beef is that the only way to to disable them is through the device manager as you said. The Jmicron controller shows the 'safely remove hardware' every time I turn on an external drive and lets me disconnect them with a click (like usb flash drives) before I turn them off.

I could just turn them off without removing them first but I worry about data integrity. Sometimes I do this with flash drives when I'm in a rush but I'm leery to do this with 1tb and 1.5tb drives where the backups on them are important.

 

[RebateMonger]

I don't have a definitive answer about the JMicron controller. My reading on these Forums has always indicated a lot of issues getting their eSATA ports to work as they should. So I've avoided using the JMicrons.

The one time I actually tried using the JMicron controller on my personal desktop, I downloaded the driver directly from JMicron's site, installed it, and it totally trashed my Vista PC. The appearance was that the download contained malware, but I don't really know what went wrong. I used my Windows Home Server backups to restore my PC back to the image from the previous day.

Almost all my clients have been using Silicon Image 3112 or 3132 SATA controller cards in their Windows servers for their daily backups. Those drives are swapped weekly. The Silicon Image controllers also give no "Safely Remove Hardware" option. And even if they did, we wouldn't use them because that would require logging onto the server to remove the drive. My clients just pull the drive during the day. The backups all run late at night.

Our weekly swaps have been uneventful. The backups are tested monthly and there's been no sign of file corruption. Note that these backups are using Windows NTBackup and we always VERIFY the backup afterwards. This means that the last access to the files was definitely a (very long) READ operation, not a WRITE. I think that makes it pretty safe to just pull the drive.

 

[ch33zw1z]

I wanted to post something helpful, but there's nothing helpful when it comes to JMicron. I fought the JMB363 for about a year on my Asus P5K. Goodluck, steer clear of JMicron in the future..

 

[j2innet]

hi after updating latest jmicron driver, i manage to hot plug my eSATA drive
i went to jmicron site, http://www.jmicron.com/Driver.htm
and then it bring me to the ftp site, ftp://driver.jmicron.com.tw/jmb36x/XP_Vista_Win7/

 

[deputc26]

Between this and the SSD controllers it seems like JMicron is running a sloppy show.

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: deputc26
Between this and the SSD controllers it seems like JMicron is running a sloppy show.

yet thanks to being the cheapest they are in every damn mobo...

 

[najames]

I have been doing some extensive testing with a GIGABYTE GA-EX58-UD4P on both the ICH10R and the JMicron. I have latest drivers installed for each, same option settings in Win7. I'm using two WD Black 1TB drives, 200GB total in RAID0 doing large sequential reads/writes. This is running the default Atto benchmark, reading from the last line (8192.0)

JMicron
Read = 170615 MB/s
Write = 134441 MB/s

ICH10R
Read = 232411 MB/s
Write = 224163 MB/s

Taltamir, I think you're into this stuff. Is there an inexpensive 4port controller than can RAID0 ~ the ICH10R? I'd like to be able to read off 3 drives and write to 3 drives on another decent controller closer to the ICH10R performance. This is a short temp test, the company wants my test PC, so I don't really want to get an expensive controller. Silicon Image chips? I can even live with 2 ports too if they are fast.