hi,

I don't know if this is the right forum to place this question but i'll give it a try.
I recently bought a laptop as an editing machine (i7,8gb ram, 7200rpm) when the desktop is busy rendering, etc.... I have a couple of eSata drives which i was planning to use as read drives but every time that i plugged them to the computer, the performance of the NLE (premiere and vegas) suffesr a lot.
The video playback stops until it finishes reading the video from the drive and it takes a while until it starts playing again. It normally chokes when there's a clip cut. It seems to have some sort of bottleneck.

At first I thought the problem was the laptop not being fast enough (so i upgraded it a bit) but I recently tried the same drives through USB and the whole system works great. In fact, the performance is fast especially on Vegas, real time playing even with plenty of effects.
my obvious question is: why? eSata is supposed to be very fast, isn't it? like over 7 times faster than USB?
is there a problem with the eSata port maybe.
Any thoughts?

thanks in advance

eSata is suppose to be faster but sometime it is not. This is due to drivers, firmware, the chipset used in the external case.

Can you give me more information on what drive and case you are using? Is it something you put together or is it a Seagate or Western Digital external drive. What is the size and model number.

I had a similar problem with an OWC external enclosure. Traced the problem down to the chip set they were using in the external case. Just need to get a firmware update.

thanks for reply.

I have tried two different drives so far.
First is a Western Digital my studio 1gb and the other one is an internal Samsung 2.5' with an eSata enclosure.
The WD seemed to work well with the desktop which leads me to think that the problem might be in the laptop's eSata port. In fact, the firewire port next to it is faulty somehow as it keeps on dropping frames non stop when trying to capture HDV. Laptop is a Dell Studio 1550

cheers

It does sound like it is in the chipset or driver in the laptop since it works okay on the desktop.

Like I said before I was using an OWC external enclosures and had to get the firmware updated in the enclosure.

Since then I have been using only Bytecc external enclosures with the Oxford 934DSA chip set. I haven't had any problems with these enclosures with the eSata port.

I have the same problem too.

i have a toshiba laptop, and an external harddrive with Esata. The laptop doesnt recognize Esata.
i have windows 7.
Anyone has found a solution yet?

thanks,

Does the external eSata drive work on another computer?

What brand is the eSata external drive?

I think that i might have found a solution but i'm still testing.
I opened device manager and i saw an exclamation mark over the 'intel turbo boost technology driver'. I reinstalled the driver and it seems to be working now. As i said, I'm still working on it but it seems to be working and i was editing no problems the other day.
On any case, it always seemed to be a software problem