I've always used internal drives for media (sata II - 3.0 Gb/s at the moment), but I'm considering switching my paradigm to external media drives for organizational purposes.  Is there any general consensus as to what the type of external drive interface is best for this application -- i.e. esata, usb 3.0, etc?

My experience with usb 2.0 drives (NOT the newer usb 3.0 drives) is that at best, they only reach about half (or less) of usb 2.0's maximum bandwidth.  I'm therefore curious if a similar situation applies to other external interfaces like esata or usb 3.0, and if so, what kind of maximum speeds I could expect from these in the real world.  I've read that esata is "supposed" to be able to reach full sata I speed (i.e. 1.5 Gb/s), which would mean that the interface itself would still allow current 7200 rpm drives (including both sata II and the newer sata III drives ) to run at their full sustained throughput speeds, but I'm finding it difficult to confirm or deny this.  The general question is if the faster external interfaces such as esata or usb 3.0 are no longer the bottleneck when running single drives.

I'm interested in hearing about actual experiences from people who currently use external media drives.  Any feedback on this from the actual Avid community would be really helpful.

On a related note, do I understand correctly that I could "create" an esata connection by connecting an INTERNAL sata connection to an esata "bracket" (i.e. rear panel connector) and that this would give me an "esata II" connection?  This is what I've been reading, but it surprised me that it would be that simple.  If I did this, would I be limited to the sata spec of 1 meter cable length, as opposed to the 2m length defined for esata drives?  I assume I'd have to get an even shorter esata cable (2 ft) since the jumper inside the case would count toward the overall cable length, correct?

Are there other considerations involved in this?

Thanks,

Larry

I have a couple of eSata boxes that I use and they perform just fine.  Drive speeds are the same as internal SATA drives.  eSata cable lengths are fairly short so don't expect to place them far from your system.

In regard to USB 3.0 I have no experience, but I believe the bandwith is supposed to be greater than eSata.  I'm not sure that that would help much though with a SATA drive vs the eSata.

Good luck!

I use eSata drives and I think they rock. When I connect a USB drive and copy using teracopy I get 22MB/s speed on average. On eSata single drive I get about 50MB/s.

If you really want to speed things up a bit I recommend buying a multi drive enclosure. I use the the DAS801t by Edge10 which you can see here.

http://www.edge10.com/digital_storage.php

It has 8 bays and you can stripe or mirror however you want up to 4 drives at a time. It has a pretty limited controller card and it is software raid but I get good speeds. I have the first 4 drives in Raid 10 config and the other 4 in hot swap. The Raid 10 array gives me about 80MB/s.

I am going to buy a new controller card soon for it which should speed things up further.

http://www.pc-pitstop.com/sata_raid_controllers/esatapcie4.asp

I will let you know how it affects the speed.

Thanks for the replies.

editmk -- you wrote:

editmk:

I use eSata drives and I think they rock. When I connect a USB drive and copy using teracopy I get 22MB/s speed on average. On eSata single drive I get about 50MB/s.

50MB/s seems rather low to me for a current 7200rpm SATA drive.  What drive are you using?

100MB/s plus rates seem very normal on newer SATA drives.  Just to confirm, you guys are saying I'll get the same speed if I put this drive in an eSATA enclosure?

Thanks again,

Larry

PS.  I read that eSATA has a maximum length of 2 meters for the cable due to it's slightly different voltage specs.

I bought a 2TB 7200rpm Lacie drive.    Added an eSata PCI card for another 32 bucks and it works just as well as my internal drive.   This drive has eSata, USB 2.0, Fireware 400 & Firewire 800.   I tried them all and eSata seems to work best.  

I've been using an eSata drive for about a year now and it is fantastic. I've never tried a USB 2.0 drive because I read it would be slower than eSata. Don't know about USB 3.0 cuz my board only does 2.0. I bought an inexpensive Rosewill eSata single drive enclosure from NewEgg and loaded a 500GB 7200rpm Seagate into it. It seems to me that it reads & writes even faster than my internally connected sata drives but I've never actually measured the times so it's probably really about the same as the internal ones.

lalittle:

50MB/s seems rather low to me for a current 7200rpm SATA drive.  What drive are you using?

I think you will be surprised at what you actually get in terms of performance out of hard drives. I use western digitals for my 4 drive internal raids which are connected to the HP XW8600 internal raid.

I use Samsungs at the moment for my external Raids.

Download teracopy, it's free and copy something from your internal sata drive to another drive or even to itself. I reckon you will find speeds like mine.

I'm using Lacie Quadra 2TB drives here and get 120MB/s. This is on a Mac Pro with the Sonnet E2P card, but there's no reason a speedy PC wouldn't match up. So the eSATA interface is very capable of utilizing what today's drives have to offer.

I'm testing with AJA System Test which reads/writes files of any size to the drive. These numbers should match what the editing system has access to during file I/O. If you test with Windows Explorer (or Mac Finder..) the results may be slower because of inefficiencies or error-testing in the copy process.

Of course if you copy a file into the same drive the speed will be halved...

eSATA is actually supported up to 6ft., so even with an internal bracket you should be fine with the common 3ft. cable.

Just a caution to be aware when using Lacie drives - we have had much trouble with them and will never buy anything from Lacie again.

I have many esata drives and they work great for both SD and HD - none are striped.

As for transfer rates, it depends on what you're transfering to.  When I transfer P2 media from an esata drive to our SCSI AvidVideo RAIDs, I get around 100MB/s+.  If transfering to a portable USB drive, the rate drops below 10.

I've been buying raw WD Caviar Black 2TB for around $160 and a Macally esata drive enclosure for around $40 and have had very good success.  We primarily use the esata drives for P2 storage.  But depending on the length of the project we will often edit directly from the esata drives.  For bigger projects, we transfer the P2 media to a folder on the SCSI AvidVideo Raids.

I do not disagree, vpcmike :)  These LaCies are an inheritence and I've spent today looking at alternatives.

(My 2 cents: any solution that includes backup/cloning is better than any 1 drive, no matter the drive.)

I use the new WD 1tb USB 3.0 and I'm very happy with performance.  Transfer rate on average is about 130 MB/s, but it also factors on what drive you are copying from.

Using a CalDigit VR 2 drive raid, their esata card, raid 0 getting 195 to 200 MB/s. Its fairly inexpensive at around $400 for a 2T array. Includes cables but you need an esata header which they sell to get the cable out of your enclosure. Test done with AJA speed test. No, I don't work for CalDigit......

vpcmike:

Just a caution to be aware when using Lacie drives - we have had much trouble with them and will never buy anything from Lacie again.

So far, I've had no trouble with my Lacie 2 TB using eSata.   However when initially setting up the drive, I reformatted it to NTFS.  I did the full reformat--took over 24 hours--not the "quick" reformat.   I don't know if that made a difference...