I have an eSATA adapter cable from the Buffalo drive directly to the SATA port on the Motherboard. Drive does not show up. I have no external SATA port nor FW 800.
USB2 and Firewire 400 works but transfer very slow. FW 400 about 40 M/sec. USB2 starts out at 100 M/sec but then slows down to about 25-30 M/sec. Moving video files (1 GB and 7 GB) from the Buffalo to/from the C drive. Slow even with Turbo USB activated.
Generic USB driver is Microsoft version 6.0.6001.18000 dated 6/21/2006. I don't know if there's an updated driver, but it is plug-n-play.
I am running Vista 64 Ultimate, 8 GB RAM. Ishould see better performance.
Some internal SATA controllers do not support the voltage requirements of eSATA; thus the included adapter will not necessarily work in some systems.
40 MB/s is 320 Mbit/s, which is a reasonable percentage of the 400 Mbit/s limit on Firewire 400, and fairly typical for firewire drives.
25-30 MB/s is also fairly typical for USB.
Okay, thanks for the MB to Mb conversion info. FW 400 and USB is not doing the job for me. It would be okay for backups, but not editing.
I now have the Buff drive attached to a 3rd party eSATA card. Large files move from the Buff drive to the desktop at 80 MB/sec, but going other way transfer is 400 MB/sec. Is that normal? What could cause the speed difference?
All my drivers and BIOS is up-to-date as far as I can tell.
Before the 3rd party card, I had an adapter cable from the Buff direct to a free SATA port on the motherboard. No mount. I have tested those ports with internal drives okay. The computer manufacturer HP advised me to connect that way as an option. I would expect they would know about compatibility and power issues. Maybe I should call them back.
Thanks for the help.
Alex
Let me confirm that over eSATA you're getting 80MB/s READ speeds and 400MB/s WRITE speeds? I suspect you switched the numbers or added a zero, because normally READ speeds are much higher then WRITE speeds, and 400MB/s isn't only impossible for a 7200 RPM disk, it's impossible for SATA as well... 400MB/s corresponds to 3.2 Gbit/s... SATA's limit is 3.0 Gbit/s.
SATA and eSATA use the same signalling protocols, but the voltage requirements are different. For eSATA:
It's exactly as I said, but I'm just looking at the speed given by Windows Explorer as the file is being moved. Doesn't look reliable at all as numbers fluctuated. I just moved a larger file about 5 GB to/from Buffalo. Both directions 100 MB/sec did not fluctuate this time.
I tested another ext drive WD MyBook with eSATA. Transfer speed was the same in both directions. Moving a 1.5 GB file started out at 500 MB/ sec but then slowed down to 100 MB/sec - both directions.
I don't know what to make of this. For all I know it could be normal. My editing program is a little sluggish, but this is a fast machine. Do you know of a better way to test transfer speeds? Vista Ultimate 64 doesn't seem to have any utilities. Is there something I can download?
I have 2 SATA drives RAID setup as the system drive. Buffalo drive ext eSATA and MyBook eSATA.
I don't personally know of any utilities for testing transfer rates, but if you time the transfer, then do the following calculation, it will give you the average transfer rate in MB/s:
size_of_file_in_GB x 1024 / transfer_time_in_seconds = transfer_rate_in_MBps
To get transfer rates at the end of copy, use robocopy.exe from the Windows Resource Kit. Good tool for benchmarking and it is much faster then Explorer shell.