External Hard Drive: USB, eSATA, FireWire a,b transfer speed

[tiger102]

Hi, Just wanted to ask External HDD users, how fast is your transfer when using any of interface mentioned above? Please mention your HDD Specification and interface you were using.

Thank You.

 

[walkthetalk]

Currently, the fastest transfer rates are with eSATA. As a Macintosh owner, I can use FW 800, 400, USB 2.0 and eSATA with a card. My rates with eSATA top out (with 1Tb drives) at 90Mb/sec. with ONE drive. FW 800 is about 60 to 70 Mb/sec. with one drive. USB 2.0 is a f-ing waste of time with external hard disks at a top transfer of about 25Mb/sec. I have just recently moved nearly ALL of my USB 2.0 drives out of their cases to two larger 4-bay eSATA cases for my Macintosh Pro! SansDigital have $140 enclosures with a PCI-e card that helped with this! (newegg and mwave)

BTW: I cannot begin to express the hatred I have with using large hard drives with USB 2.0. The manufacturers must have been smoking cr*ck. : ) They should have included eSATA and USB 2.0 with those drives..

 

[walkthetalk]

BTW: There are FW to eSATA adapters out there! : )

 

[sleddawg]

what about gb LAN? Currious where it fits speed wise.
thanks

 

[walkthetalk]

Wow... you must be talking about iSCSI? There also was a specification to do copper and fiber via Firewire. That said Gigabit Ethernet.....

10Mbit = 1.25 Mb/sec theoretical..
100Mbit = 12.5Mb/sec theoretical..
1,000Mbit = 125Mb/sec theoretical..
10Gbit = 1.25Gb/sec = 1,250Mb/sec theoretical..

As you can see, eSATA smokes nearly all of them even at eSATA 150 (150Mb/sec). The fastest version is 300Mb/sec for eSATA..

Right now the only way to locally saturate 10Gb would be with a sizable RAID at RAID 0, 5 or 6.

For example, if you were to take 10 2Tb hard disks (RAID 0) at 100Mb/sec you could yield (100Mb/disk * 10 drives) = 10 Gigabytes/sec.. which would more than saturate 10Gb Ethernet. These are very ROUGH numbers but they give an impression..

Cheers!