Re: Large External HDs
- From: "CLicker" <CLicker@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2009 10:38:53 -0700
"Smarty" <nobody@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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"CLicker" <CLicker@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Ideally, your PC will have a few eSATA ports available from
the mother board. Mine did not, so I used these adapters
http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/adsa3gpx1.asp
Under WinXP you'll need a floppy drive available at OS
installation time, in order to integrate the controllers into
the OS for maximum performance. Otherwise you'll achieve a
mere 60 to 70 MBps transfer. I do not know whether this is
still the case in Vista or Win7.
I too have installed Addonics (as well as Rosewill / Newegg)
eSata controller cards in several of the machines here in the
teaching lab, and have never been able to get anywhere close
to the types of speeds I expected. The same drives when
installed on my internal controllers routinely get at least 60
to 70 MBps transfer rates, and sometimes spike at 100 MB/sec
or higher. The controllers from both Rosewill and Addonics
both seem to run in the range of maybe 40 MB/sec, sometimes
lower. Some of them are installed on older machines with older
standard PCI (but not PCI Express) bus architectures.
I have 3 questions related to these controllers, and would
appreciate any comments:
1. Are you using the drivers which come on the small CD which
is packed with the Addonics controller cards, or some other
driver?
I down loaded the self-extracting, zipped driver suite from the
Adaptec site.
BTW, as one can see from the picture of the card, it is PCIe
x1 - which was the only connector one of the PCs had unused,
greatly influencing my choice.
2. Why is a floppy drive needed per your earlier comment. I
have installed all of these controllers without the use of a
floppy drive (but do have floppy drives in several of the
machines if they should be useful in some way.)
I do not recall, from several years ago, where I read of this;
while searching for alternate driver instructions because the
install instructions accompanying the 1225SA controllers wanted
a floppy drive (to create the driver disc), or while searching
for Adaptec performance commentary. Neither target PC has a
floppy drive - and I was not in the mood to purchase a USB
floppy just for this. I settled for approximately a 3 fold
improvement over USB drives.
How to integrate the driver with the OS, also requiring a
floppy, is spelled out in Step 5 of the Quick Start Guides
accompanying the 1225SA controllers. When I tried to substitute
a CD for this, WinXP had no option to reference it at the point
where "install a third party driver" is asked. How archaic.
I do not monitor the performance of the controllers with any
regularity (nor have I ever monitored the solo internal drive),
but since video files are so large it's simple to calculate the
rate of total transfers, which are consistantly in the range of
60-70 MBps (around 4 GBpm) but I've no idea of the peaks,
valleys, and pauses along the way.
The Dell systems in which the controllers are installed are AMD
3200 and 3800 running 32 bit XP.
Some time ago now, I purchased a newer AMD P2/945 processor with
eSATA support on the motherboard and 64 bit Vista-SP1
preinstalled. The same eSATA drives, at times, transfer at over
200 MBps. Still way short of 3 Gbps, but much appeciated.
So you and I have similar Adaptec experiences, but I'm unable
(or unwilling?) to explore the possible perfomance improvement
of integrating the driver with the OS. These older 2 GHz
systems may not get better performance and there is no need to
utilize the controllers on the newer system.
3. Can you hot-swap the drives with XP or do you use some 3-rd
party technique such as "Hot Swap.4.5.0.0."?
I use third party software, as neither MS nor Adaptec saw fit to
provide this, and it is indeed HotSwap 4.5.0.0, having used the
earlier version as well.
On the AMD 3200 capture system, where I usually only have one
eSATA drive in operation, HotSwap is flawless. On the AMD 3800
system, which is now used only as a playback machine, HotSwap
sometimes does not see some of the 750 GB drives in each of the
bays, while it always sees all the 1 TB drives in all the bays.
On Vista I don't even try to hot swap eSATA drives, I power down
when I'm done with the external(s).
.
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