eSATA!.. is it worth it?

[arthurking83]

On the old system:

I first installed the updated AMD chip sets, one of which was labeled an AHCI driver.. something to do with either the southbridge or northbridge controller driver. made no difference.
Then I enabled the AHCI feature in the BIOS.... from IDE to AHCI.

Windows booted up fine for a few reboots.. as I said maybe 5 maybe more, but I only had one issue with no boot media found with the eSATA drive connected at bootup time.
I disconnected the eSATA cable, and windows booted up fine for the next few starts.
Then I got the same no media boot error after POST, and no booting at all.
Finally disconnected all internal drives(as the BIOS wanted to boot from the eSATA drive and then others) and Windows started to boot, but locked up where the windows logo starts to form.
After multiple attempts and attempts at repairing Windows, I then loaded Win7 again onto the spare 250G drive to try to recover the older installation and files and stuff.. thinking I recovered as much data as i needed.. except the vital business emails!... DOH!... and reformatted the larger faster 1Tb drive.. readying it for the new install of Windows(which I've been meaning to do for a while since I uninstalled a few programs and stuff a while back).

I'll do a bit more checking of what drivers each drive is using, and so far all I know about the system is that it has 6 SATA controllers.. no idea on what drivers/chipsets and how many of each are in use, or being used.

First thing I thought was to rearrange the drives onto different ports to see if there's any difference in speeds too.

[arthurking83]

After more testing, and re-installing(I re-installed, instead of using the backup image).

Loaded the latest drivers from AMD(ATI-Catalyst!? )
Updated the BIOS to the latest version, which gives a few more config options.
One of the options is to allow changing the SATA transfer mode to/from 3Gb/s, 6Gb/s and Auto.
Reset AHCI to IDE for the two eSATA ports.
There are 4 SATA ports set all together, which you'd expect to connect hdd's too.
And there are 2 more(ie. totaling 6 all up) set on a small raiser, and set pointed forward towards the front of the case for other devices such as SATA optical drives, or in my case, case mounted eSATA case connectors, with one eSATA connector on the rear motherboard panel(too hard to get too, so I prefer to use the case eSATA connectors).

The two once fast, but now slow, drives were always connected to the main set of 4 SATA connectors.
The SATA options in the BIOS are that you can set the SATA to enable or disable, which I gather if set to disable, would then work in IDE mode
The other SATA option is that you can set the two final SATA ports(5&6) to IDE, Auto, AHCI mode, independently of the 4 main ports.
The 4 main ports were always set to SATA mode(enabled) and I don't think I saw an option for AHCI(prior to the BIOS update).

very strange now that the two slow drives have gone all limp and flaccid.. I'm seeing transfer rates of 10-15MB/s now(according to PCWizard), where initially I was seeing 50MB/s and more.
But the almost identical third WD 250G drive is still seeing the faster transfer rates of 50MB/s.
And all of this is irrespective of which port the drives are mounted too.

The only difference between the two identical WD 250G drives and the third non identical, is part number, and the fact that there is no molex connector on the third one.
I'm assuming that the two identical (...-HBBO) drives are an older design probably IDE drives updated to SATA and the SATA controller is an older(different design) and they just run slower on a proper SATA controller in .. I dunno a proper SATA mode.
The third WD250G drive is a -KLBO model designation, has no molex power connector, and didn't have a pin jumper attached, where the other two did(I now removed, to see if there is any difference.. nope!)
Weird how they worked fast on the older install(and on my other PC, where they did the same duty as storage and cache).. but now they've decided to retire and live life in the slow lane.. painfully slow lane.. to the point where my two main programs are affected by the issue.

Me and my bright ideas huh!?

I'm hoping that the PC store as a pair of Samsung F3's, which seem to be exactly what I need now.
Maybe I'll try getting one of them and one Caviar Black to compare, but what I'm seeing on their respective performances on The Tech Report, there's barely anything to separate them.

as a side note.
I've re-installed Win7 on the Samsung 1Tb drive, and even though the difference in performance is 'minimal' according to this PCWizard benchmarking tool, the difference in actual use is significant.
On the WD 250g drive(the faster one) there's a small, but noticeable delay in opening any program of largish size..
ie. something like notepad loads instantly irrespective of hdd used, but a program like CaptureNX2 takes a few seconds(maybe 3 or 5) to load using the WD drive.
It basically explodes on the screen using this 1Tb Samsung.
My current Samsung 1Tb drive is not the F3 model. I have the slower 'green' model(HD103SI).
Whereas I'm going to get two F3(HD103SJ), non green, non eco friendly, gas guzzling, CO2 emitting, 7200RPM industrial strength noise inducing, power houses!... and all to save a few seconds in program load times

[Jackaroo]

Hi Arthur
How much memory in the system. Have a look at where the page file is hiding. I have found in the past, moving large files from a drive that has a page file on it, can slow the whole thing considerably. May be way off base, but maybe worth a look

[arthurking83]

Hey Jackaroo!(how are ya )

It was the two WD 250Gig drives..

with the switch to using AHCI on the motherboard, they kind'a packed it in and refused to work at their best(no idea why).

I looked at the data specs for the type of drive on WD's website and found that they have jumper pins on them, that do actually do something.
Switching the jumper from pin 1,2 to 5,6 was supposed to enable 150MB/s mode (otherwise.. what mode is it running in ??)

So I tried that as well, and basically just got stuck at 10-15MB/s transfer rates.

I got me two Samsung HD103SJ's today, and basically.. THEY FLY!

they easily sustain approximately 90MB/s transfer rates, and so far, copying the current year's 200Gig worth of photos at those kinds of rates... where the slowest rate I noted was 89.9 and generally up at about 91-92.

The time difference in transferring files is pretty startling.

I was used to seeing approximately 2+ hours to transfer that kind of data size, whereas Windows is currently estimating about 23mins for this lot, where the eSATA drive was the source.

Last night, I backed the same lot of files to the other faster WD 250G drive, and it took about 2hours, from the eSATA drive as the source.
I tried to use the slower WD 250Gig drive as the source initially, but Windows file transfer said .. 9 hours!

After a quick test with both the hard drive performance software and some quick file transferring, I also found that setting the cluster size from the default 4Kb to 64Kb, there is enough of a performance increase to justify it.
Considering that 99.9% of the files on these drives is going to be massively larger than 64Kb, I don't think the wasted disk space is going to be a concern.

ps. FWIW, system ram is 4Gb, and no page file has been touched.

Now when I'm using CaptureNX, with the NEF files sourced from the slower WD drives, it loaded/rendered the image verrrry slowly.. close to 20sec or more.(noting that CNX renders a 20Meg NEF as a 80-90Meg tiff file).
Using the faster WD 250Gig drive, the NEF's loaded in about 1sec.. maybe 1.5secs
Now from the new 103SJ drives, they definitely load in 1 second or less.

The only thing I've been having trouble getting my head around is why the two different WD 250G types are so different in performance

considering I tried the various jumper arrangements, formatted the drives(to be sure), rearranged them onto the SATA ports.. etc. the difference was about 4-5x faster (for the KLB0 drive over the HBB0 drive types).
The silly thing is tho, that before the change to where I enabled AHCI in the BIOS, the drives were more than fast enough, and everything ran fast.
The two drives were connected to SATA2 and 3 on the motherboard.
What killed the two drives was enabling AHCI, which was changed only for the two external SATA ports(5&6), as the 4 main ports were already set to AHCI!

[brindyman]

usb 2.0 The theoretical maximum data rate in USB 2.0 is 480 Mbit/s (60 MB/s) per controller and is shared amongst all attached devices.

usb 3.0 A new feature is the "SuperSpeed" bus, which provides a fourth transfer mode at 5.0 Gbit/s. The raw throughput is 4 Gbit/s, and the specification considers it reasonable to achieve 3.2 Gbit/s (0.4 Gbyte/s or 400 MByte/s), or more

SATA/e-sata Second generation SATA interfaces running at 3.0 Gbit/s are shipping in high volume as of 2010, and prevalent in all SATA disk drives and the majority of PC and server chipsets. With a native transfer rate of 3.0 Gbit/s, and taking 8b/10b encoding into account, the maximum uncoded transfer rate is 2.4 Gbit/s (300 MB/s)

so yes while e-sata is just ahead it is probably the most prefered but as more motherboards start to come out with usb 3.0 that will be the one to go for..........until

SATA 3:

3.0 standard (peak throughput about 600 MB/s (10b/8b coding plus 8 bit to one byte, without the protocol, or encoding overhead) was released on May 27, 2009. While even the fastest conventional hard disk drives can barely saturate the original SATA 1.5 Gbit/s bandwidth, Solid-State Drives have already saturated the SATA 3 Gbit/s limit at 285 MB/s net read speed and 250 MB/s net write speed with the Sandforce 1200 and 1500 controller.

but sata 3 will be a while off yet so no need to feel left behind