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eSATA speed with different disks
Just got the FirmTek eSATA PCIe card and installed.
Semms to work fine – at least my WD and LaCie disks shows up, together with my “bare bone” disks.
Just for the fun I ran some Disk Whack test. Both LaCie and WD performed about 70 MB/s read and write. The bare bone Hitachi is faster, about 108/119.
All three disk are 3,5″ – does the enclosure slow speed that much? Or am I missing something out here?
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9 Replies
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Could be the enclosure, could be the RPM speed of the drive, or it could be that maybe one of those drives is actually a 2 drive raid.
There are no “technical solutions” to your “artistic problems”.
Don’t let technology get in the way of your creativity! -
None of the disk are raided – I can see the disk inside the WD and LaCie enclosure and the Hitachi disk is bare bone. Sure no RAID there.
So I guess it’s that the LaCie and the WD are 5200 rpm drives – the Hitachi is a 7200 rpm drive.
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[Niklas Wikman] ”
So I guess it’s that the LaCie and the WD are 5200 rpm drives – the Hitachi is a 7200 rpm drive.
“No, not necessarily. There are many factors involved. Number one is, your Hitachi is a newer SATA drive, and the newer models have fewer platters inside than older SATA models, and thus achieve faster read/write times.
Second, because you can’t see inside your LaCie and/or WD drive, and you have no idea what’s in their enclosures, they are able to put the least expensive drives available inside, and that’s exactly what they do. Since slower IDE drives are cheaper than SATA drives, they often put them into their enclosures with electronics that read and write to IDE via SATA connections, but without the true speed/throughput of SATA.
So, keep in mind, when buying a pre-manufactured firewire or SATA drive that comes in a sealed enclosure, you are buying a “pig in a poke,” as they say. Just because it says SATA drive on the box, doesn’t mean it’s SATA through and through.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.
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David,
Thanks for great info.
I’d like to run “real” SATA for my video disks. Up until now we’ve used LaCie d2, WD MyBook Studio edition.
I’m very interested to learn what external disks that are real (e)SATA?
The reason is that I want to be able to bring my project to home and that is not doable with bare bone SATA disks (at least not in a convenient way). -
You see to have forgotten my previous advice to you in the thread below:
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/8/1069178
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.
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David,
No – but I forgot I followed your advice… *blushes*
I do now have four of those neat little boxes.
But I will (of course!) not change the disk inside them until the warranty has expired.
But – and this is a good thing to know – those 2,5″ disks will not be faster than about 70 MB/s (which is the speed of my LaCie and WD drives).
I did the same test with one of my Elite AL enclosures and was disappointed with the lack of speed over eSATA.According to OWC tech support this is due to the fact that 2.5″ disks are much slower than 3,5″ disks, even if they are 7200rpm disks (such as the Seagate Momentus inside the OWC enclosure).
(And this Hitachi Deskstar seems to be one of the fastest disk for the moment, besides those 10k rpm disks).
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As I recall, that’s because they are bus-powered. The bigger units that are wall-wart powered allow for the faster 3.5″ drives.
You need to start thinking about a SATA raid next…, or at least raiding two individual SATA drives together.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.
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Yup, I do.
I’m glad to hear your experiences with the SATA RAIDs you perhaps are using?
It’s a djungle out there – and since I’m in Sweden it’s okay to buy from the States – but if things won’t work, then it’s a bit trickier (as I believe) to return the stuff.
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A really good place to look at disk speed drives and other speed tests.
https://www.barefeats.com/Pasi
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Editor, Colorist.
Mac Pro, 8×3 Ghz, 8 Gb ram, ATI Radeon HD 4870, KONA 3, Sony PVM20L4, Tangent Devices Wave.
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