eSATA questions

vice86 · 10 Jul 2010

Hi there. I just bought a 2TB Fantom drive to consolidate the 3 externals I have plugged into my Dell XPS Gen 3 right now. I copied over about 450GB of files to it so far and that seemed to take forever. About 20 mins to copy 20GB of files...starts out at about 40MB/sec but midway slows down to about 20MB/sec.

I have one more drive that contains about 980GB that I want to copy over to the 2TB drive but I don't even want to deal with how long that will take so I was thinking of getting an eSata PCI card (only one PCIe slot on my ol' Dell and that's occupied by the graphics card)

If I'm copying from one external to another do I need a 2 slot eSATA PCI card and BOTH drives plugged into it?

If I get a one slot will I only get half the speed?

Johnathan Lyman · 13 Jul 2010

You actually don't need to get a real PCI eSata card, as long as you have free SATA ports on your motherboard.

There are adapters that plug into your SATA ports and mount to your PCI bracket wall with an eSATA port. Plugging into an eSATA like this will essentially give you the same speed as if you were copying using two internal hard drives. If you want multiple eSATA ports, you can get PCI-based eSATA expansion cards for cheap that have multiple INDEPENDENT eSATA ports on them. each is FULL speed so, NO you won't get only half speed.

Keep in mind PCIe is different from PCI.

Newegg.com - KINGWIN 15.63" eSATA PCI Bracket cable Model ESAC-02

Newegg.com - Rosewill RC-220 Silicon Image PCI External eSATA 1.5G x2 non-RAID Controller Card Also includes an additional Low Profile Size PCI Bracket

vice86 · 13 Jul 2010

thanks for the info. I'd have to look if my mobo even has the SATA ports you speak of. I think my drive is a SATA drive and not an IDE drive. I'm not a super computer expert.

FliGi7 · 13 Jul 2010

Wait... how are all of your external drives currently connected to your computer? Are they all connected via USB or are you using an eSATA connection? I'm lost on where the eSATA fits into this.

veldthui · 13 Jul 2010

And you dont really need a proper e-sata drive either. I had a 650GB Segate from a PC (from a RAID array that went bang) and it is just sitting on my desk hooked up to the sata plug. I use it for daily backups on my server box. Not critical if it goes bang as there is the weekly backup on a NAS device.