External Enclosure USB Transfer Rates

Today I picked up a Hitachi 7k500 for peanuts so am now looking for an enclosure for my old hard drive. I'm looking for one with USB and eSATA, but will primarily be using it with USB and am trepidatious about the transfer rates. Does anyone have any recommendations or benchmarks on such an enclosure?

I am currently considering this Acomdata.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817729007

However, I am also tempted by this tool-less Eagle.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817193062

I've also heard good things about this Vantec model.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817392009

I would appreciate first-hand USB read/write speeds on any enclosure, but particularily on these three. Thanks a bunch.

 

Do you have an eSATA/USB combo port on your laptop?

 

I don't have any of the enclosures you mentioned but I do have two USB enclosures (one with e-sata but only used the USB, no e-sata on PC's). One is Apricorn and the other is Rocketfish. I also have two WD passport 2.5" 500GB and 320GB external USB drives.

With that said, all enclosures when running with USB have transfer rates between 10MB and 34MB per second transfer rates at various times depending on what files are being transferred. I would have to say the average is about 20MB / sec. Packed files, such as ISO files, transfer the fastest 30MB to 35MB/sec. Take that same file and extract it on the external drive then do a transfer of the individual smaller files and you will see about 15MB per second or slightly slower.

I can image a HD with 30GB of data to an external USB in about 25 minutes which would work out to about 20MB/sec on average. That is about the same as a transfer from the external back to the laptop.

The above info is from the laptop in my sig. Not scientific but real world on my laptop and externals.

 

e-sata will give you full HDD performance if you have an e-sata port. Good option: US$14 2.5“ Power Over eSATA enclosure / ebay +details (Delock / HE-2521B)

 

Thanks everyone.

I understand that eSATA is the preferred way to connect an external drive, but it won't always be an option for me. deeastman, thanks for the insight into the different transfer rates with different types of files. I'm also wondering about how transfer rates (over USB) change with the make/model of the enclosure. The impetus for my concern is a history with poorly performing enclosures (the ones I used would not exceed 5 MB/s). This was a long time ago--when SATA enclosures were hard to come by--so maybe it's no longer an issue. I suppose I'm just drawing at straws to see which enclosures have worked well for others.

What can reasonably be expected from a USB hard drive? The maximum speed for USB2.0 is 60 MB/s, but it's my understanding that this is a burst limit, not a sustainable transfer rate. The HDD that I intend to put in the enclosure maxes out at about 45 MB/s. How much of that should I expect to keep using USB?

 

Link shows performance difference using the same HDD on e-sata and USB2.0. On e-sata it averages 63MB/s, on USB 2.0 it gets 27MB/s. Linked enclosure has USB2.0 or e-sata port, so can connect to any notebook.

 

Okay, I'm sold. Why aren't more enclosures using power over eSATA?

 

It's just in the last 6 months or so that laptops have been shipping with ports that are compatible with it. Like any new technology, it takes a while to start really rolling. DVD drives didn't replace CD drives overnight, a lot of software still ships on multiple CDs instead of a single DVD.