Old HDD enclosure question

[Philippine Mango]

I've got a fairly old HDD enclosure (circa 1996?) that currently has an 80GB Maxtor 7200 RPM , 8ms seek time (circa late '99/early '00. I ran sisoft sandra utility on this drive [os boot drive (long story)] and got a score of 31MB/s. I have another drive which is a 120GB maxtor 7200 RPM 9.3MS seek that is not in an enclosure and yet it recieves a 47MB/s Drive index. So I'm wondering if my HDD enclosure is causing my 80GB drive to output data slower than the 120GB drive or not. Even though the 120GB drive is newer, the 80GB has better seek time. I'm really torn to whether or not I should use one drive or the other for the OS/game installations or not.

 

[canadageek]

the enclosure has to convert your ide signal to usb and back again. that should explain your bottleneck

 

[CrispyFried]

The enclosure probably has its own ide interface, it may be only ata/33.

 

[Philippine Mango]

Originally posted by: canadageek
the enclosure has to convert your ide signal to usb and back again. that should explain your bottleneck

Sorry, I forgot to mention that this enclosure is an internal 5.25 enclosure...

 

[Philippine Mango]

Originally posted by: CrispyFried
The enclosure probably has its own ide interface, it may be only ata/33.

and the computer detects the HDD as ATA 5....

 

[canadageek]

so what is the purpose of the enclosure? so you can put the drive in a 5.25 bay? cooling?
and, i yhink crispy may be right....that old enclosure probably only supports an older standard like ata33

 

[Philippine Mango]

yea thats what I was thinking (its in a 5.25 bay because of easy removeability) because the cage the drive is in looks like it uses a 40 conductor cable.

 

[CrispyFried]

Originally posted by: Philippine Mango

Originally posted by: CrispyFried
The enclosure probably has its own ide interface, it may be only ata/33.

and the computer detects the HDD as ATA 5....

It may be detected that way but windows will only allow it to go as fast as the ide interface. And for UDMA speeds you need the 80 conductor cable.

 

[Philippine Mango]

Ok I took the drive out of the HDD enclosure but it is still only doing 31MB/s... I don't understand, a 8ms drive from 2000 with ATA 133 support (is running at 100 right now) can only do 31MB/s while a drive from 2004 with 9.3MS seek can do 47MB/s!? WTF