eSATA is transferring slower than USB (external HDD)

B

beema

New Member
Hello there,
I'm hoping someone on this board can help me out.

I just got a Seagate FreeAgent Pro 500GB external hard drive. I was excited about it because it has an eSATA port, and so does my mobo. So thinking I'd finally get to utilized my computer's eSATA capabilities and that backing things up would be so much quicker, I spent the extra money on the drive and an eSATA cable (drive didn't come with one ).

I got everything up and running and started to transfer some stuff to the drive, but it seemed to me the transfers were going a lot slower than they should. After all, eSATA boasts speeds of 3GB/s.

So I downloaded a little app called HD Tune to test my transfer rates, and here's what I got:

with eSATA connected - 20.5MB/s burst

with USB2.0 connected - 25.6MB/s burst

What the hell is going on here? Not only is the eSATA not moving very fast, but the USB is actually faster than it!

The only thought I had is that either my computer doesn't have its eSATA configured correctly, or I bought a bum eSATA cable.
Here is the cable I bought:
http://www.amazon.com/36IN-Esata-Si...3?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1178737372&sr=8-1

and here is a link to my mobo info:
http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/p5wd2/

Does anyone know what might be going on?
 
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Honestly, that's not too much of a difference. I wouldn't worry that much about it. And speeds like that are plenty for most anything. Raw performance might be poor, but I suspect streaming would be fine. If you're playing movies from it, capturing video, or whatever, I don't think the speeds would affect it.

Now, I could be totally wrong, but I suspect that drive is actually an IDE drive with a USB/SATA converter on it. Having both USB and SATA makes me seriously doubt it's a direct SATA connection, thus getting true SATA speeds is unlikely.
 
The_Other_One said:
Honestly, that's not too much of a difference. I wouldn't worry that much about it. And speeds like that are plenty for most anything. Raw performance might be poor, but I suspect streaming would be fine. If you're playing movies from it, capturing video, or whatever, I don't think the speeds would affect it.

Now, I could be totally wrong, but I suspect that drive is actually an IDE drive with a USB/SATA converter on it. Having both USB and SATA makes me seriously doubt it's a direct SATA connection, thus getting true SATA speeds is unlikely.
Click to expand...

That makes sense, but I still don't understand why the SATA would actually be going slower, or even the same speed as USB. I would understand it if it didn't go THAT much faster than the USB, but this doesn't seem acceptable to me.
:(
no more prepackaged hard drives for me...
 
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