eSATA performance?

[Russell Lasson]

You should probably be getting over 120MB/sec with two drives. Do you have them stripped as a RAID 0 or a RAID 1?

-Russ

Russell Lasson
Universal Post
Ridgeline Digital Cinema Mastering
Salt Lake City, UT

[Tom Matthies]

Raid 0. Two channel eSATA card with a control cable going to each drive separately. It just seems I should be getting throughput then this.
Tom

[Jeremy Doyle]

I have 2 samsung spinpoint 750g hard drives running software raid 0 in a OWC esata enclosure with each drive connected separately via a sonnet 4×4 and I’m getting writes of 170 and reads of 190 using the Kona test. And my raid is half full.

So yeah, I think you should be getting better throughput.

[Bob Zelin]

it is my opinion that your drives are full. I was one of the very early users of Firmtek 2 bay eSATA arrays, and even “in the old days” 2 Seagate drives stripped RAID 0 would give you 128Mb/sec. For you to be getting 70Mb/sec at RAID 0 – either your drives are full, or one of your drives are dying.

Bob zelin

[Chris Poisson]

Hey Tom,

Bob is probably right about the drives being full, but I have a two banger Firmtec at RAID 0 on my MBP and I get about 125mbs with it. But it does have about 400 gigs of reee space on it, so maybe that’s the problem.

Have a wonderful day.

[Zane Barker]

Like others have said it may be because the drive is full, however if that is not the case then you may have a similar issue to one I recently had.

I was experiencing slow performance on my two drive raid that I connect to my MacBook Pro. I ran the AJA test and my data rates were similar in speed to what you are getting. I decided to wipe the drive and start clean. When it failed to partition, I ran some tests on the drives individually and as it turns out one of the drives was having an issue and would not always respond. One drive not functioning properly would easily cause the issue. Replaced the two 500GB drives that I had with a pair of 1TB drives and the speed was back.

So its possible that one or both of the drives may have a issue.

There are no “technical solutions” to your “artistic problems”.
Don’t let technology get in the way of your creativity!

[Tom Matthies]

“Fullness” isn’t a problem in this case. I have two 500GB drives (Hitachi Server Class drives…the “good” ones)in a RAID 0 configuration. The drives are recent and the RAID is less than 25% full. Lots of space left on the platters. I regularly run Disk Warrior on all the drives. I have three other Hitachi drives (1TB) in the internal bays on the MacPro and the Aja test shows them to be only slightly faster coming in at around 85GB/sec. for an individual drive.
Firmtek’s specs show that this configuration should be much faster.
Still working on it…stand by.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

I just updated the drivers and firmware on the card but It had no effect on the performance.
Tom

[Andrew Commiskey]

Some drives are shipped with the jumpers set to 1.5 (SATA 1) instead of 3.0 (SATA 2) this setting could cause the problem.
Drew

Chaos is the beginning of everything.

[Tom Matthies]

I finally found the problem and it was good old fashioned pilot error. When I RAIDED the drive pair it appears that I mirrored them rather than stripping them. This would explain the slow read/write times. I copied everything from the RAID to a spare drive and created a new stripped RAID using the two drives. When I perform the Whack test now I’m getting over 120MB/sec. from the pair.
My HD material is playing well now.
Thanks to all and sorry for the goof up.
Tom