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external harddrive only running half speed

B

Bfavre444

Senior member
I have a laptop (Presario 900Z) and I just got a 3-port firewire pcmcia card. Now I bought a external enclosure (ME-720F) from compgeeks and put my 80GB 7200rpm in it. I connect everything, run a benchmark in SiSoftware SANDRA and the drive index is only 10MB/s. I knew that the ME-720F is known to do 20MB/s average.

So I took the enclosure and tested it in a friend's desktop through firewire. He got the expected 20MB/s in SANDRA. So I thought it must be the PCMCIA card that's the prob.

Then I took the enclosure AND pcmcia card and connected them to another friend's Sony laptop. And he got the expected 20MB/s in SANDRA also. So the card is not the prob either.

So it's not the enclosure's problem, not the harddrive's problem, nor the PCMCIA card's problem. I'm baffled. I'm totally stuck.

BTW, I'm using WinXp so the drive/card are all auto detected and works all fine. I also have minimal background services running in WinXP so my laptop runs pretty fast. The PCMCIA card's chipset is VIA.

It's just that I get 10MB/s in SANDRA. I can't think of anything else that can be wrong. I tried switching around the cable in the ports. No difference. I mean, IEEE1394 is IEEE1394, it's a standard. But I'm getting exactly half the speed.

Thanks. Any help is appreciated.
 
I found the problem. It's the PCMCIA controller's problem: the TI PCI-1410 pcmcia controller. I finally found a post on the web where some guy had the same TI chipset in his laptop pcmcia controller. There was a temporary fix by TI and I tried it but it didn't work. I can't find a final solution from TI though. Strangely though TI hasn't come out with a final solution yet for this TI PCI-1410 controller which is used in a LOT of laptops. I wonder why there aren't more people with this problem. Guess they just don't use firewire drives with laptops.
 
Originally posted by: Bfavre444
I wonder why there aren't more people with this problem. Guess they just don't use firewire drives with laptops.
Click to expand...

They probably aren't aware that their transfer speed is actually that slow. 10MBps probably seems about normal speed in 4200rpm laptop-land.

 
Originally posted by: RalfHutter

They probably aren't aware that their transfer speed is actually that slow. 10MBps probably seems about normal speed in 4200rpm laptop-land.
Click to expand...

I agree, you are probably being limited by the HDD's transfer rate. Look up the specs for your laptop's HDD and see if the througput is close to the speeds you are seeing.
 
Nono, sorry for any confusion, but I'm not talking about or using the internal laptop drive. I'm saying the problem is the pcmcia controller by TI, which is the slot that connects a firewire card which connects to the my 7200rpm external harddrive.
 
USB2 would have the same problem. The bottleneck is at the PCMCIA controller, no what you stick in the pcmcia slot, the TI controller will limit the speed.
 
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