Maximising eSATA Speeds?


Recommended Posts

Hey guys. I tried searching on the forum to see if someone covered this topic before, but I didn't find any results.

Anyway here goes:

We all know USB2 uses 480 megabit/sec and eSATA transfers at 3 gigabit/sec.

Technically speaking, 3 gigabit/sec is equivalent to 375 megabytes/sec am I right?

Well, my Western Digital My Book 1 TB Home Edition (connected via eSATA) is only transferring at approx 30 megabytes/sec. It once peaked at 50 megabytes/sec but promptly dropped back down to 30.

I'm wondering how we can maximise the speeds? Maximising it to 375 would be a dream come true :D

Any help is appreciated!

Thanks,

~ wutang01

Link to comment
https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/612742-maximising-esata-speeds/
Share on other sites

  1Frothy said:
I can't even get eSATA to work here, wait. Maybe I should try again with Vista SP1 Refresh.

I had the same problem, and was stumped. My My Book could work through USB2, but it wouldn't appear in My Computer when connected via eSATA.

Until I refreshed the page in Device Manager. Try it. It worked for me :)

  1Frothy said:
I have the Intel? Desktop Board DP35DP, do I need to enable RAID or install the Intel? Matrix Storage Manager Driver?

If you have two RAID controllers on your MB, make sure they're both enabled in the BIOS. Sometimes the eSATA port is on a different controller than the rest

  wutang01 said:
I had the same problem, and was stumped. My My Book could work through USB2, but it wouldn't appear in My Computer when connected via eSATA.

Until I refreshed the page in Device Manager. Try it. It worked for me :)

Aww Foo Crap. Still nothing. Maybe I'll enable RAID next.

Also my apologies to wutang01 for sabotaging this thread. :/

Edited by 1Frothy
  1Frothy said:
Aww Foo Crap. Still nothing. Maybe I'll enable RAID next.

Of course that didn't work, thats like saying refresh the desktop if your CPU isnt running at full speed. Try changing the sata options IDE/AHCI/Auto, it might need to be on AHCI for it to work.

  omganinja said:
Of course that didn't work, thats like saying refresh the desktop if your CPU isnt running at full speed. Try changing the sata options IDE/AHCI/Auto, it might need to be on AHCI for it to work.

Enabled AHCI. Turned off PC. Turned on PC.

Windows Vista loads fine.

Turned off PC again, turned on eSATA device, Turned on PC and now the Hard Disk light on my main PC is on and the "loading Windows" screen is up, but that's all that ever happens, except for the odd eSATA device light flicker.

But if I turn off the eSATA device while "loading Windows" is "stuck", then it resumes loading Windows without any problem. It's like it's having trouble recognizing the eSATA device at Windows load.

post-168601-1200050193_thumb.png

Edit: Added screen shot of Device Manager. No eSATA drive found.

Edited by 1Frothy
  omganinja said:
You may need drivers for your Sata controller to get AHCI to work correctly, find the chipset that controls it and google drivers for it.

It worked!!! (Y) Thanks omganinja

After enabling AHCI I had to reinstall the Intel 'inf' chipset drivers. Now the Controller is no longer 'Generic SATA AHCI' it's now listed as 'Intel® ICH9 6 Port SATA AHCI Controller - 2922' and my external eSATA drive is working!

  wutang01 said:
Is it normal if transferring files from My Book (eSATA) to my SATA RAID HDDs ... is about 16MB/s?

It was about 55MB/s from SATA HDDs (non-RAID at the time) to My Book (eSATA) ...

Haha, they should be the same, either the read times on the SATA drive is bad or the write speed on the My Book is bad, try it from another drive to the My Book and see what happens.

You won't be able to max out the theoretical limit of the eSATA interface because HDs simply can't transfer at that speed. You would need either a RAID configuration or something that can transfer all of its data from a RAM cache.

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.