Is eSATA and USB 2.0 fast enough (or faster) to keep up with a Raptor?

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ericspc

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Jun 26, 2006
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I'm trying to figure out transfer speed of hard drives verses the ability of connection sources to handle the speed of data transmission. Setting aside the Latency and Access speed variables.

So really the question is: will an eSATA connection KEEP UP WITH or SLOW DOWN a Serial ATA Raptor hard drive that is connected?
What about USB2 and FireWire?

USB 2 is theoretically 480 Mbps
eStata, well I don't know
EIDE is 133 Mbps?
FireWire is 400 Mbps

Stats from some hard drives:
Western Digital Caviar 80GB Hard Drive ATA-100 - 7200, 8MB,
Maximum External Transfer Rate (Mbits/sec): 100

The Raptor
Data Transfer Rate on Serial ATA: Up to 3000 Mb/sec

a normal 7200rpm Seagate Barracuda:
Data Transfer Rate on Serial ATA: Up to 3000 Mb/sec
 
Most HD's can -not- use all the bandwith provided by the "old" ATA-133 connection.

The interface connection (ATA/SATA) is far faster than what a HD can read/write....so don't worry about it.
 
Esata tranfer rates, with a quality enclosure, are with 98% of what you will get connected to the motherboards Sata port.

I have an Antec Mx-1 and a Medion which I have benched.
 


It is important to keep you B's and b's seperate

Megabyte(MB) = 1024 Kilobytes
megabit(Mb) = 1,000,000 bits(someone correct this one if its wrong)

Now to get megabytes from megabits you device it by 8

USB 2.0 480 Megabits/sec or 60 megabytes per second. USB has massive overhead so you will not be getting much over 35 megabytes per second

eStata is 150 megabytes per second or 300 megabytes a second depending on your board(while 1500Mb does not = 150MB the controllers are limited to this). Either way its just like having it connected to the computer. The long cable and the enclosure may slow it a bit, but not enough to worry about.

EIDE is 33/66/100/133 megabytes per second. The speed it uses is based on the controller and the drive connected. The down side here is 2 drives sharing a cable can cause one drive to wait for the other to finish. Sata solved this with one cable per drive and by being a serial interface it uses much less wires(7 vs 40IDE(ata 33) and 80 EIDE).

FireWire is 400 Mbps or 50 megabytes per second. There is also firewire 800 at 100 megabytes per second. Firewires system overhead is much less and it reaches far closer to its theoretical speeds. It IS faster then USB for hard drives. But USB is cheaper and has won the war.

Moral of the story. A Raptor will work fine in a E-SATA enclosure. Just make sure it one with cooling as a raptor gets warm. And it its a V-raptor, well its plugs do not line up, so not all enclosures will work.
 
Why waste your money? Raptors are overpriced and undersized.
A Seagate 7200.11 with 32MB cache is equal to and or beats the raptor in all tests but one, this is per ol' Toms here.
Really raptors are just you taking a dollar and throwing it away.
 
The 7200.11, while comparable in sequential data rates, will never match a Raptor in randoms, simply due to rotational latency.

As for your question, USB or FireWire would slow it down, but eSATA would not.
 

Most of the apps on the chart take read and write into consideration.

When you use a computer it grabs files and parts of files from all over the drive the latency does add up. If you are just running straight transfers, yes its a waste, but for jumping all over, scanning searching working on the fly game loads(not gonna increase fps, but may reduce stutter when on the fly loading) with lots of apps that access different spots on the drive(any multi tasking honestly) it is faster.
 
Thanks for the lesson. I never could keep that straight.

So if I had a 2nd gen (3.0) SATA 7200 rpm hd connected to an (3.0) eSATA port or an internal SATA (3.0), the hd could provide the MainBoard with all the data it could handle thru the SATA connection?

So SATA really blows all the old standards away?

USB 2.0 - 60 megabytes per second.
eStata - 150 megabytes per second or 300 megabytes a second
EIDE - 33/66/100/133 megabytes per second
FireWire 400 - 50 megabytes per second.
Firewire 800 - 100 megabytes per second.
 
EIDE controllers are essentially fast enough to handle most SATA drives (probably not Raptors) when operating independently with no activity on the the other drive on the cable. However, newer drives are faster than older ones and most newer ones came as SATA - so they beat yesterdays EIDE drives.

Once you get outside the box, well, there is no eEIDE - so the only option is eSATA, but it is essentially as fast as a direct connection to SATA on the mobo. Initially some manufacturers were making their own "eSATA" by just using a SATA pass through connector. But eSATA connector are different (and more robust to handle more frequent connecting and disconnecting) and will not connect to SATA. I beleive most if not all have it straight today and do not advertise SATA as eSATA - but there was some confusion in the past and it pays to be wary.
 


Basically. eSata is especially nice, because with one small convenient connector, you get 5 times the speed of USB, 3 times the speed of Firewire 800, and all the native SATA commands that hard drives already use for the internal SATA connections.

Keep in mind that eSATA does not equal SATA - they are the same speeds, and transmit the same data, but the plugs are different (the SATA is better for holding solidly, but the eSATA one is better for not wearing out after thousands of connections and disconnections.
 


Not quite, While the drive can deliver that speed it would only be from the drives cache(built in memory and its size limits what it can hold). The drive mechanical nature limits its actual throughput(and causes its speed to drop the farther through the drive you go. so you may start at 90MB/sec but end at 65-70MB/sec.). Very few drives(if any) actually even saturate the ATA 133 bus. But as said small cables and no more sharing is the big advantage. SSD's(Solid State Disks) when they get fast enough will give you a solid 300ish MB/sec.

If you look at the link below you can find the average read speeds of many drives. Either way E-SATA is the way to go, since USB will cripple a drive(35 MB/sec sucks, but that is about all you would get).
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/hard-disks/average-read-transfer-performance,658.html
 
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