• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  New removable drive bay slows down SATA write speeds ?

  Posted by Rj Miles on October 22, 2006 at 4:29 am

  I picked up a couple of 4 bay removable enclosures from an Ebay seller.

  I find when I use the new Maxtor 500GB SATA hard drives in the drive bay, the data rate writing to the drives is slower than when connected directly to the Sonnet SATA connection. Copying files from a drive bay drive back to an SATA drive in the G5 is fast/normal.

  Oddly, an older maxtor 300GB HD does not suffer this data write slow down and is fast to/from the drive when mounted in the drive bay.

  The enclosure seller has sent me a newer version of the drive bay trays which are supposed to be SATA 300 rated, but they did not make a difference.

  Just for reference, I am timing the copy of a 650MB file. Normal copy time is 11 sec either way. The slowdown causes copy times anywhere from 1 min to 3 min 45 sec, which is a severe data rate slow down. Sonnet says it is due to errors and the resending of data blocks to correct the write errors.

  Has anyone seen this in an external SATA removable enclosure? Sonnet said this used to happen early in SATA with bad cables.

  I assume I am going to have to return the drive bay and try something different.

  Thanks for any comments you can share.

  RJ
  …

  Rj Miles replied 19 years, 10 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

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  Bret Williams

  October 22, 2006 at 3:11 pm

  I can’t comment on the sonnet and your system, except to say that the 11 seconds might even be a tad slow. Just for fun, I found a 680MB file on my internal ATA100 drive adn copied it to my external SATA by Acomdata. The controller PCI card came with the drive. It took me roughly 15 seonds to copy to the eSATA and to copy it back to the internal ATA100 it took about 18-19 seconds. This was all limited to the capability of reading and writing of a 4 year old ATA100 drive, AND I’m running a Dual 1 gig MDD G4 with a cheapo eSATA by Acomdata. I’ll have to say for the eSATA by Acomdata though, it’s been turned on for over a year now and hasn’t fliched. On the other hand I’ve killed 2 internal Hitachi/IBM ATAs over the last 4 years. I think the MDD systems just get too hot inside, but that’s another long gone story.
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  Rj Miles

  October 22, 2006 at 4:37 pm

  Thanks for the reply.

  The 11 sec in/out times are fine for a single drive at SATA 150. They would be even faster with a SATA 300 rated card, and still faster when you start to stack up drives in a RAID.

  It’s the deadly slow write speeds I mentioned that need to be fixed.

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