M4400 & eSATA

I'm getting about 15-20MB/s (transfer speed) transfering files from my Lacie d2 Quadra (eSATA 3 Gbits port) to my M4400 with Vista 32Bit thought eSATA port.

eSATA port has 3 Gbit/s bandwidth, so I wouldn't get about 300-375 MB/s transfering data?

 

Your harddrive maxes out at like 40-50 MB/s due to mechanical limitations and thus is your bottleneck. For reference, I've only seen higher than 60MB/s on RAIDs.

While I think you should be getting more like 25-40 MB/s, I'm not familiar with your brand of external harddrive.

 

Maybe posting HDTune screenshot to see the HD info?

 

You might wanna look in the BIOS what setting is set for SATA performance. If it is ATA then your external hard drive is working like a USB device. Looking at the provided transfer speed it looks like that. You can try switching to AHCI or IRRT (not exactly sure if these were the correct abbreviations) but you can easily get a blue screen while loading Windows. If you get the blue screen then go back to the one setting you were originally using. I myself am on Windows XP Pro and nothing else than ATA works Windows just won't install if this setting is set to AHCI or IRRT. Maybe it's a missing driver in the Win installation CD (I've tried some different with no success at all). So my point is that if you're on ATA mode eSATA is NOT working and you also might get a bonus for slower speeds for the internal hard drive. But Vista may be OK, dunno
Good luck!

 

If it's set to ATA and you want to switch to AHCI you'll have to manually load the AHCI drivers for the Intel Matrix Storage Manager.

Boot up with SATE operation still set at ATA in your BIOS, load the AHCI drivers, reboot, go to the BIOS, set it to AHCI and start windows.....easy as that.

YOu can get the separate drivers from the Dell download page here http://support.dell.com/support/dow...1&impid=-1&formatcnt=1&libid=41&fileid=290229
Dell doesnt have the latest IMSM on there yet but with the download from Intel there isn't a separate driver file, only the full IMSM software.
Load this driver and then get the 8.8 version from Intel

 

You should see the same HDD transfer rates as if it was mounted internally. See this thread for test results some using enclosure + eSATA and some for installed in the computer.

I think in terms of MB/s, but 300MB/s (SATA 2 interface speed) is about the same as 3Gbps. The Lacie web page indicates a 115MB/s maximum burst speed but, as already noted, the speed you will see is dependent on the hard drive inside. You won't see the benchmark results in real life file copying. This will also depend the sizes of the files you are copying and whether they are near the fast or slow end of the HDD.

Finally, if you are copying files between the external and internal HDDs, the bottleneck will be whichever is the slower drive. This is probably your internal HDD if the external HDD is 3.5".

What models are your internal and external HDDs?

John

 

Internal: Hitachi HTS723225L9A362 (250GB 7.200 rpm)
External: Lacie d2 Quadra

By the way, mi BIOS is on IRRT mode.

 

IRRT is AHCI + extra features, so that shouldn't be a problem.

And your internal HDD should have a minimum read transfer rate above 30MB/s (it's not on Tom's Hardware's list, but you can estimate where it would be).

Device Manager should be able to tell you what is inside the Lacie enclosure.

If you want to explore the problem further then run some benchmarks on both the internal and external HDDs and see how the speeds compare. You can also see how the transfer performance compares between a folder full of small files and one big file (eg a big zip file).

John

 

@ surfasb:
Internal Seagate 7200.3: Max. 85MB/s!
External 2.5'' Hitachi 5400 (was originally sold with my E6400) via eSATA & Revoltec case: Max. 63 MB/s.
@ checho: 15-20 MB/s is the typical speed of USB 2.0 & way to slow for eSATA ...
BTW: Deleting files on the ext. hd seems to be much faster with Intel Storage Manager 8.8 than with 8.5.