View Full Version : Benefits of external e-sata drive
Brian Luce May 22nd, 2009, 05:22 PM Is there a real world avantage to using and external hard drive connected via e-sata cable to a 54mm express card on an older 1.66 ghz dual core laptop? Or am I just making work for myself? The bus speed is like 533mhz. The external hdd would be for video files.
Harm Millaard May 23rd, 2009, 07:23 AM In comparison to what?
Internal SATA disk: No.
External Firewire disk: Yes. FW800 is slower, FW400 is far slower.
External USB disk: YES. An enormous difference.
David Tamés May 23rd, 2009, 07:49 AM A while back I did my own benchmark testing comparing external SATA, FireWire 800, FireWire 400, and internal SATA using my MacBook Pro, and here are the results:
Comparing MacBook Pro external drive performance (http://kino-eye.com/2007/07/20/comparing-macbook-pro-external-drive-performance/)
The test confirms for me that unless you’re using a hardware RAID, the fastest single disk performance you’re going to see with a MacBook Pro is with an external 7200RPM SATA drive connected via a SATA interface card. And I did not compare to USB 2.0, however, it would have been even slower, in spite of the specifications on paper, FireWire is superior to USB 2.0 for hard drive transfer rates. An interesting thing I'd like to compare in the future would be a hardware RAID-0 via FireWire 800 vs. a single external SATA drive via SATA interface. Specs on paper tell you nothing, you have to test and see performance under real world conditions.
Harm Millaard May 23rd, 2009, 09:40 AM David, you made a good point about RPM's of disks and especially in notebooks. I don't have figures readily available for 4200 or 5400 disks, since I consider them unsuitable for editing and have not tried to benchmark them.
Brian, my earlier response to you only applies to 7200 RPM disks.
A rough rule of thumb is that the various kinds of disks can achieve the following sustained transfer rates (depending on fill rate and a number of other factors). This applies to 7200 RPM disks only.
SATA/eSATA: 80 - 100 MB/s
Firewire 800 : 45 - 55 MB/s
Firewire 400 : 25 - 35 MB/s
USB 2.0 : 18 - 25 MB/s (depending on the number of other USB devices attached)
For capturing all disks are fast enough. For editing even a single SATA or eSATA disk can be overwhelmed during editing.
For comparison, a two disk SATA raid0 achieves around 160-180 MB/s, a 10 disk or larger SATA raid3 array can achieve 800 MB/s easily with the correct controller.
Brian Luce May 23rd, 2009, 01:27 PM So a card like this for my notebook port OWC ExpressCard/34 eSATA SATA I/II Add-O... (EXP34SATAIIP1) at OWC (http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/EXP34SATA2P1/)
an eSata connector cable, an external case with eSata port, and of course a hard drive, and I'm good to go?
There's surprising little info on this topic on the web. Very odd since it seems like such a great solution.
Also, my slower bus speed won't be the limiting factor? It's only 667mhz
Harm Millaard May 23rd, 2009, 02:09 PM Correct. The speed of your FSB 667 MHz is not a limiting factor and even irrelevant.
Dennis Wood May 24th, 2009, 08:00 AM Harm, we've been researching NAS and gigabit network performance for nearly a year now which included extensive SATA testing in RAID 0 and 5 using various cards and onboard mobo chipsets. These tests are PC based but have used SMB1 and SMB2 on both 32bit and 64 bit platforms. The most we've ever seen sustained from a single drive sustained on large file transfers is in the 60MB/s area which is consistent with practical theoritical predictions. Our testing is based on sample files transfers as well as encodes which are timed and calculated so based on average results. We don't typically test with empty drives so the platter peripheral speeds are not overly skewing our results. Our common test file set is an 5GB SxS card dump/file set with files up to 2GB in size.
We are now seeing speeds over gigabit LAN that average 103MB/s read and 93MB/s write to a gigabit LAN connected NAS (RAID5, 5TB) unit which we've found is a very effective collaborative editing setup. To sustain these speeds requires a minimum of RAID0 x 3 drives on our editing workstations using SMB2 (Vista 64 bit).
Cheers,
Dennis Wood
www.cinevate.com
Bill Ravens May 24th, 2009, 08:26 AM I routinely run RAID0 on an Addonics SATA/RAID PCIe (eSATA) card in my laptop. Sequential read/write speeds test at 96.7/90.96 with Diskmark on a RAID0x2. By comparison, the onboard single SATA 7200RPM Hitachi hard drive tests at 36.3/27.8.
Harm Millaard May 24th, 2009, 11:59 AM Dennis, those are very good figures for a NAS. If you start teaming NIC's you can even further improve on those. I only use the NAS (7 x 1.5 TB) for backup/storage, not for video editing, but I have 16 TB internally, of which 12 TB in a raid30, for media and projects, so the need for me to use a NAS for NLE work is not urgent.
Nevertheless, your results are very positive and look like a very good alternative to internal storage.
Adam Gold June 2nd, 2009, 10:26 PM Hey Harm (and all you other SATA experts out there) --
I just picked a couple of 2TB eSATA drives to use for backup and archive, and I ordered a 4-port eSATA card and cables to go with them. But on my Areca 1231, I've got 5 unused internal SATA connectors inside the PC case. Would I get better performance by simply running these connectors outside and a SATA to eSATA cable straight into the drives, rather than using the PCI-X eSATA card? I guess the advantage would be having the Areca manage all of the drives (the external drives wouldn't be part of the internal RAID array, as I picture it).
Would there be any difference in speed/reliability? Any reasons to do or not do either option?
Harm Millaard June 3rd, 2009, 04:18 AM Hi Adam,
I do not think you will notice a large difference in performance and since it is for backup purposes it may not be very relevant, but IIRC the 1231 uses an IOP 341, which is a pretty good chip. The 4 port card you ordered may not achieve the same performance, especially if you have more cache installed on the Areca. Another advantage of using the Areca is that you not fill up your system as much as when adding the 4 port card, thus leaving more room for airflow and effective cooling. If the 1231 has ML (multi-lane) connections, all you need is a single forward breakout cable from the Areca to the eSATA drives (up to 4).
Adam Gold June 3rd, 2009, 10:10 AM Thanks Harm. I knew I could count on you.
I may do a little experimenting when my current projects are done in a few weeks. I'll report back if I find anything interesting.
Adam Gold June 5th, 2009, 12:56 PM So, as is usual whenever Harm comes up with a really intriguing suggestion, I've gotten myself in over my head. Well, I haven't actually done anything yet, so therefore have not destroyed my system, but after opening up the SuperMicro case I now have many questions. This is still all about eSATA drives, so I hope it's not too OT. But here goes:
The Areca 1231ML controller has three SFF-8087 ports on the card, according to the manual.
--First of all, every reference to SFF-8087 I can find calls it SAS. Do SATA and SAS use the same connector?
--Of the three ports, two are connected to bundles of red wires, 7 of which go to the backplane and one of which dangles, unused. The third port remains unoccupied. My thought was to connect the breakout cable you suggested to this unoccupied port. But all I can find are SAS to SATA x4. Is there such a thing as SFF-8087 to 4x eSATA? Or should I buy four adapters after it splits? And is there a length limit?
Finally, the mobo has four unoccupied SATA ports. If my external eSATA drives are just going to be JBODs, is there a performance penalty just coming off the mobo rather than the Areca? And is here where I could just use SATA to eSATA connectors?
Sorry for so many esoteric questions... it's always dangerous when I get to thinking. The only reason this matters at all is that I'm out of slots in the case and would have to sacrifice my FW add-in card to make room for the eSATA add-in card.
Any thoughts or advice here would be most appreciated.
Harm Millaard June 5th, 2009, 01:45 PM The Areca 1231ML controller has three SFF-8087 ports on the card, according to the manual.
--First of all, every reference to SFF-8087 I can find calls it SAS. Do SATA and SAS use the same connector?
--Of the three ports, two are connected to bundles of red wires, 7 of which go to the backplane and one of which dangles, unused. The third port remains unoccupied. My thought was to connect the breakout cable you suggested to this unoccupied port. But all I can find are SAS to SATA x4. Is there such a thing as SFF-8087 to 4x eSATA? Or should I buy four adapters after it splits? And is there a length limit?
Finally, the mobo has four unoccupied SATA ports. If my external eSATA drives are just going to be JBODs, is there a performance penalty just coming off the mobo rather than the Areca? And is here where I could just use SATA to eSATA connectors?
Sorry for so many esoteric questions... it's always dangerous when I get to thinking. The only reason this matters at all is that I'm out of slots in the case and would have to sacrifice my FW add-in card to make room for the eSATA add-in card.
Any thoughts or advice here would be most appreciated.
SAS in this case is just SATA plus a power connection. Usually these are combined in a single connector.
When you use, as I suggested, a single multi-lane 8087 forward breakout cable, you end up with a single connector on the Areca and 4 SATA connectors for your external disks. The normal length of these cables is around 32" but you may be able to get longer ones. That still leaves you with the power connection requirements, that are circumvented with SAS connectors, that include both SATA and power. But unfortunatley that is not possible with your controller card. So what you need is an external housing with its own power supply, cooling etc. and the forward 8087 breakout cable. (BTW, Areca cables may be difficult to find, but 3Ware uses the same ones and are more readily available).
Adam, there will likely be a slight, and I really mean slight (at least in your case for your purposes) performance penalty if you connect the eSATA disks to your on-board controller. However, that does not solve the connection and power supply issue. You still need to feed them with some form of juice and you need SATA connections. I still think the easiest way out is to use the ML capability of the 1231.
Brian Boyko June 5th, 2009, 02:49 PM I tried using ESATA on my MacBook Pro, but I kept getting kernel panics.
I use it on my editing rig in Vista and it works fine - it's great. ESata is basically like having access to an "internal" hard drive from outside your box. Don't really see much of a reason to use anything else if you've got it.
Adam Gold June 5th, 2009, 03:47 PM Well, as usual, practicality trumps theory. I was able to get a mini-SAS to 4xSATA breakout cable, but the 4 SATA connectors are female, as are the connectors at the SATA end of the SATA to eSATA cables. So until I can find them with male SATA ends, that's out. I actually have a support/sales request in at 3Ware to ask about a breakout cable to eSATA or what else they would suggest.
But in the meantime I just got the four eSATA to SATA cables -- they're longer than I wanted, at 6 ft, but that's all they had -- and I am in the process of hooking them up to the mobo as we speak. The eSATA drives all have outside power and cooling so that's not an issue.
I'll post back if I can actually get them to work.
Thanks for all the advice so far. Keep it comin'.
Vito DeFilippo June 5th, 2009, 07:23 PM I tried using ESATA on my MacBook Pro, but I kept getting kernel panics.
Brian, I have a 17" MacBook Pro from last year. I would get kernel panics with eSata, but only if I turned on the drive AFTER the mac. Worked fine otherwise. And when the last update to OS X came in, I updated and now the drive works whether I turn it on before or after.
I'm using a Dynex express card sata adapter ($10 on Ebay, can you believe it?), in a Nextstar Drive Dock with a Samsung 1tb spinpoint drive.
Adam Gold June 6th, 2009, 09:09 PM Well, after a day of fiddling, I finally got all four drives up and running. This is probably of little or no interest to anyone but me (and possibly Harm) but I'll quickly go through a condensed version just in case anyone else is considering this.
Connected four drives using SATA to eSATA cables running from the internal SATA ports out the back of the case to the drives. Powered up drives and started PC; only two drives were visible. Supermicro website says updated BIOS will fix this; it didn't. Web search reveals that you must have AHCI enabled to see more than four drives; enabling this in BIOS or enabling SATA RAID results in BSOD when booting. Further web research reveals that you must hack your registry and set the MSAHCI value to "0" and then make the BIOS change; this worked and I now have four 2TB external drives on line.
Of course, it can't end there; all the BSODs apparently confused Vista 64 so much that it re-validated itself, possibly thinking it was a new install when the drivers changed; result is that Premiere stopped working and demanded an uninstall/re-install, which will also mean a series of updates and a Cineform Prospect HD reinstall....
It's never simple, is it?
Harm Millaard June 8th, 2009, 02:52 PM Adam,
This is weird. I have never heard of this (that should not come as a surprise, since I'm not all that knowledgeable), but this is really strange. I have to compliment you on your troubleshooting. Great work. Your investigative powers and problem solving techniques can be an example for many, many of us.
The weird thing is that for the mobo and the CPU, it should not be able to discern where your disk physically is, internal or external and the connector to the mobo is the same. Just SATA, that's it.
With all your reinstall problems I'm not going to ask you to try the following just now, but if you ever have the time and want to try it, do you have the same problems with a forward breakout cable from the Areca to the new drives?
Adam Gold June 8th, 2009, 03:18 PM If I can ever find something to adapt the forward breakout cable to eSATA, I will definitely try it. The four SATA Ends are male, as are both ends of the SATA to eSATA cable, contrary to what I posted before -- I always get confused because these days all connectors seem to have both male and female parts. But I'm sure it will be fine; Supermicro called back and confirmed that even though the mobo has six SATA ports, unless AHCI is enabled, the system will only see four devices. And the best way to enable is to have the devices connected during the OS install; Vista has AHCI support and drivers built in, but the drivers are disabled during install if the devices are not connected. Once disabled, the lack of drivers causes an instant BSOD until re-enabled and BIOS is adjusted. Found out a lot more about this while troubleshooting.
All seems well for now. We'll see.
While I have you, I'm adjusting all my scratch disks as we now have a panoply to choose from. Here's what I'm contemplating:
C: System -- 10k Rpm 150GB Raptor -- OS and Programs
D: Workdisk -- 7 x 1TB in RAID0 (soon to be RAID3 w/Hot Spare) -- Project, Captured Video, Captured Audio
U: 2TB External (actually 2 x 1TB Hitachi in RAID0) -- Video Previews, Audio Previews
V: 2TB External (same as U:) -- Media Cache files
W: 2TB External (same as U:) -- DVD Encoded files and Backup Drive
X: 2TB External (same as U:) -- Final renders and Archives, Swapfile/Pagefile (30GB pagefile, as I have 20GB of RAM)
Make sense?
Harm Millaard June 8th, 2009, 03:51 PM That make perfect sense but one recommendation if I may. Recently someone remarked to me a shortcoming of Windows, in that it always tries to balance memory loads between RAM and pagefile. With your large amount of RAM available, it may be good to test whether a 2 or 4 GB pagefile may force Windows to use more of your RAM and give you a performance gain. You can't do without a pagefile, but it may be worth to try if reducing your pagefile to a smaller size can (incredibly by common wisdom) improve performance.
I have not yet been able to test this, but if the claim that Windows tries to balance between pagefile and RAM is accurate, it makes sense to reduce the pagefile if you have large amounts of RAM available.
You have a very nice setup with this configuration, Adam.
Adam Gold June 8th, 2009, 04:00 PM That's exactly what I was going to ask about -- did the pagefile need to be so huge and did I need one at all? You answered both questions nicely before I could think to ask them.
As always, thanks for the advice.
Harm Millaard June 8th, 2009, 05:46 PM Adam,
Where we came from was usually a system with 1 or 2 GB of RAM, and then we needed, even with expensive disk space at that time, additional memory for temp files. Times really have changed. We now often use 12 GB or even more RAM, so the need for temp files has decreased, even though our OS and programs need more space to operate efficiently (that is called progress). In the old days we had a common wisdom that the pagefile needed to be around 1.5 times available memory. Hence your initial setup. But I think we have to reconsider that. With the large amounts of RAM available on modern systems, we may need to rethink our old ways and personally I look forward to seeing some hands-on tests with different pagefile sizes on different configurations. I'm in a quandary myself, I have 12 GB of RAM and had, just like you, initially set up my pagefile to 18 GB. I then reduced it to 8 GB and have not seen any performance degradation. But to be true, I have not seen any improvements either.
If I come across any relevant info I will let you know.
Adam Gold June 9th, 2009, 11:47 AM Man, there is always so much to learn... wonder what the Mac folks do for fun?
I'm wondering if the Passmark or any other benchmark testing would stress the system enough to measure this...
Adam Gold June 13th, 2009, 11:16 AM Update, for those who are still awake at this point: When trying to burn a BD of our latest project, I noticed our BD burner had disappeared in Encore. It was there in Device Manager and Windows said it was using the latest, best driver (but "could not start device"), but the AHCI BIOS did not see it; neither did the Disk Management Utility in Computer Management, nor did Encore. So I installed the latest Intel Matrix Storage Manager (which showed a 2007 date on the POST screen and noted it only supported HDDs and CD-ROM drives, and which earlier had refused to install before I had properly enabled AHCI on the machine) and presto! Drive shows up; successful BD burn. Have no idea if that really was the problem/solution, but there you have it.
Whew!
Now, another question for anyone still with us. As I've now found the proper adaptors and connectors to attach the Areca controller to eSATA drives, I want to add five more drives to max out the Areca's capacity, because at this point I am completely HDD crazy. Each connector would have to go to a single 1TB drive. It appears that the only way to physically do this is to buy five individual eSATA drives, as any tower multi-drive configuration only has one eSATA connector -- and all the drives need to be the same size as the internal ones to properly RAID and all that. Does this make sense? Or is there a better way?
Harm Millaard June 13th, 2009, 09:26 PM Adam,
Yes. Your assumption is correct, at least IIRC the 1230 is not a multilane controller. One thing that may work (I have never tried this) because it seems logical: An external drive cage will likely have a single multilane connector, but the 1230 has individual connectors. So a solution may be to try a BACKWARD breakout cable instead of a FORWARD breakout cable, if these even exist.
Given your previous headaches with m/f connectors, I would carefully note what connectors are required at each end and search Areca, 3Ware and the like if they have the correct backward breakout cable.
Adam Gold June 14th, 2009, 12:39 PM I actually have the 1231ML, which has three multi-lane mini SAS connectors on the card, two of which have cables that break out to four SATA connectors at the other end. Seven of those go to the backplane for the internal drives. So my plan is to install the third breakout cable with my male-male SATA to eSATA adaptors to the eSATA cables, and then run each of those to its own external 1TB eSATA enclosure/disc.
Unless I am horrendously misunderstanding something... which is quite likely. All the cables and adapters physically fit; it remains to be seen whether they actually work to move data.
PCs are fun!
Adam Gold January 31st, 2010, 01:37 PM So just to revive a ridiculously old thread, I found a very interesting enclosure at B&H -- it holds four HDDs but has four separate eSATA connectors in the back, so I can have four drives of any size with a single power supply but utilize all my connectors and treat all the disks independently if I want, or RAID them via the controller card. So four connectors will go to the new enclosure, probably filled with 1.5 or 2TB bare drives, and the fifth connector will go to a single dockable hot-swap enclosure so I can use multiple HDDs like big backup floppies -- pop it in, fill it up, pop it out.
Anyone (Harm?) see any issues with this plan?
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