Re: Large External HDs


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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).





Thanks very much for your very informative and prompt reply.
I had never considered the possibility that Adaptec drivers
would possibly even work with the Addonics controller card.

Addonics ships Silicon Image-compatible drivers (written by
JMicron Technologies) which work reliably but very slowly.
The Addonics board you cited also appears to use the Silicon
Image SIL 3132 chipset, so I am puzzled about the Adaptec
and 1225SA controller reference you mentioned above. I am
guessing you may be actually using an Adaptec rather than an
Addonics controller, and this would explain not only the big
speed difference you are achieving but also the use of
different drivers.

My experience with Hot Swap 4.5.5.0 has been that it
provided the ONLY way to do hot-swapping of my drives using
Vista, but most recently, after the latest Service Pack was
issued by Microsoft, the "Safely Remove" hardware feature of
Vista now (finally) works properly, eliminating the need for
Hot Swap entirely. I have a half dozen external eSata drives
which I frequently swap between PCs and Macs here and it
truly delightful not to have any reboots required to unmount
a volume.

Thanks once again for your assistance. I sure wish I had the
type of speed you are seeing from your eSata drives. I am
guessing that a switch to the Adaptec card (which is about
twice the cost of the Addonics) may solve that problem.

Smarty

Yes, Adaptec cards. I don't recall mentioning Addonics - but
it wouldn't be the first time I've goofed. Oh yes, now I see
my error in the link provided. I had shopped Addonics, but
decided against it. It was still in my shopping links.
Apologies.

And thank you for the update re: Vista and eSATA swapping.
Based on reading done prior to this I was reluctant to ask
Vista to do pretty much anything that might jeopardize an
external disc's integrity. I'll pursue that SP now and test
out the swapping with non-critical discs for a while;-)

Alas, my spending log does not go back to the Aaptec
purchase, but I assure you I'm generally penurious - though
others just say "cheap";-)





Thanks again for your help. I regret the purchase of the
cheaper Rosewill and Addonics controllers, which cost me about
$28 apiece in quantity 5. Their speed is a real bottleneck,
and the Adaptec offers and apparently delivers at least 3
times the performance, for what appears to be a $59 cost. It's
not uncommon for me to be moving 60 or 70 GB from one drive to
another, and the time difference I would enjoy would shrink a
15 to 20 minute transfer down to 6 minutes or so. It was dumb
of me to go with the least expensive eSata controller, in
retrospect.

The Addonics and Rosewill also both suffer from dysfunctional
/ nonfunctional boot support, meaning that an eSata drive will
not successfully boot on any of the machines I have here with
these controllers. I am guessing that the Adaptec also has
this covered. Not a big deal for most users, but a nice
feature for those who like to change OS by a reboot to another
external drive rather than create multi-boot partitions.

Penurious, cheap, frugal or whatever you want to call it, I am
certainly penny wise, and more than occasionally pound
foolish.....

Don't ask the croupier's opinion;-)

As far as alternate OSes, I've no experience. However the
install guide for the Adaptec controller has instructions for:
installing an OS on a drive or array connected to the
controller, setting the native BIOS boot sequence, and
installing the controller driver into the OS (XP, Vista, and two
flavors of Linux at the time I bought these). Once again, a
floppy is required.

Other operation comments, for what they are worth:

If the eSATA drive is powered before booting, the Adaptec
controller will load its own BIOS (immediately after the native
BIOS and before the OS) and the drive will be recognized as or
by the OS. If no drive is found by the card, it still goes
through the screen monologue - informing the user that its BIOS
was not loaded.

If the drive is powered up after booting the OS (in my case
WinXP), there is no screen monologue but it's less transparent
timewise and a real XP resource hog for the few seconds it
requires, but effectively the same result.

Hot-swaps are almost instantaneous as far as recognizing the new
drive, depending upon the directory size.

I do not insert a new drive (in the 4 bay unit I use) whilst an
application is writing to another bay, as the writing
application has, at times, failed when doing so. I've no idea
of the culprit: WinXP, the App, the controller card, the drive
array, or all of them.

This latter problem is of little concern to me as the drives are
used most often in read-only mode, being primarily a video
archive, and I seldom have multiple apps writing - though I do
tend to multi-task whimsically;-0)


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Large External HDs
    ... your PC will have a few eSATA ports available from ... when installed on my internal controllers routinely get at ... floppy drive (but do have floppy drives in several of the ... or while searching for Adaptec performance commentary. ...
    (rec.video.desktop)
  • Re: Large External HDs
    ... your PC will have a few eSATA ports available from ... installed on my internal controllers routinely get at least 60 ... floppy drive (but do have floppy drives in several of the ... for Adaptec performance commentary. ...
    (rec.video.desktop)
  • Re: Large External HDs
    ... 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. ... 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. ... So you and I have similar Adaptec experiences, but I'm unable to explore the possible perfomance improvement of integrating the driver with the OS. ...
    (rec.video.desktop)
  • Re: in lieu of swapping out hard drives
    ... I am skeptical that usb and eSATA are handled the same way in the BIOS. ... boot, I am given the option to boot from the external drive." ... I plugged and unplugged, boooted from local drives, etc. about a dozen ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: eSATA support
    ... It has an eSATA port in the back. ... By connecting an ordinary SATA HD to this port (but note the ... >> USB/Firewire external hard drives up to now. ... >> external power connector alongside the eSATA port. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)