[ale] SATA PCI card or external USB enclosures?

[agcarver+ale at acarver.net (Alex Carver)]

On 3/4/2013 13:30, Ron Frazier (ALE) wrote:
>
>
> Alex Carver <agcarver+ale at acarver.net> wrote:
>
>> On 3/4/2013 12:45, Ron Frazier (ALE) wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> Calvin Harrigan <charriglists at bellsouth.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 3/4/2013 3:04 PM, Ron Frazier (ALE) wrote:
>>>>> I don't have any experience with PCI cards for this.  For
>> enclosures,
>>>> I
>>>>> like the Vantec brand.  Quality seems to be good.  Some of
>>>>> them
>> have
>>>>> fans for cooling.
>>>>>
>>>>> Ron
>>>>>
>>>>> On 3/3/2013 2:47 PM, Alex Carver wrote:
>>>>>> Anyone have a suggestion for a good but not too expensive
>>>>>> SATA PCI (not express) card and/or external USB-SATA
>>>>>> enclosure?  The
>>>> enclosure
>>>>>> for my backup drive just died (the drive seems fine...I
>>>>>> hope).  I
>>>> just
>>>>>> need to pop it into a new box or just slip another card
>>>>>> into the
>>>> case
>>>>>> (mobo has only IDE, no SATA).
>>>> +1 for Vantec I have several, all several years old, none have
>>>> failed to date.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Another PS.  If you use a sata-usb enclosure, you can connect
>>> via
>> usb.  No PCI card needed.
>>>
>>
>> I know, the Bytecc was a combo USB/SATA box.  But I was pondering
>> the speed boost by going for SATA and moving the drive inside the
>> machine. I'm still pondering the choice though I may just go with
>> the external USB for simplicity.  The reason for the PCI card is
>> because I have no SATA on my system so I would have to add on.
>>
>
> Hi Alex,
>
> The fastest transfer I've gotten on an external USB2 interface is
> about 30 - 35 MBps.  According to
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Serial_Bus
>
> The effective throughput for USB2 is 35 MBps.  In this case, the bus
> is being saturated.
>
> With USB3, you get a throughput of 625 MBps on the interface
> according to the same article.
>
> According to this article on SATA
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sata
>
> With SATA2, you get 300 MBps and with SATA3, you get 600 MBps.
>
> HOWEVER, the drive is going to be your limiting factor.  I have SATA2
> ports in my desktop machine and SATA spinning hard drives.  The
> fastest drive to drive transfer I've ever gotten is in the 75 MBps
> range.  So, with a spinning HDD, you could probably double your
> transfer speed by going to internal or external SATA or USB3.  If you
> had an SSD, which, choosing one at random from a magazine I have,
> reports read and write speeds in the 500 MBps range, you could
> saturate a SATA2 bus and come close to saturating a SATA3 or USB3
> bus.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Ron

Unfortunately I can't use the full bandwidth of SATA3 or USB3 because
those require the faster PCI Express bus.  Since I don't have PCI
Express at all on the motherboard I have to stick to USB2 and SATA2 or
severely throttled SATA3/USB3.  My dead enclosure was USB2 so even
switching over to SATA2 will give me a 5-10x speed improvement.

The drive itself is an enterprise class Western Digital (don't remember 
the model number).  Fairly recent drive (about two years old) SATA3.