Why is my eSATA backup slow?

[BlueCat57]

Can anyone help me with where to start to figure out why my eSATA backup of less than 70GBs takes several hours?

My expectation would be that it should take much less than that.

I'm using the built-in Windows 7 backup utility.

I have a 1TB drive in a Rosewill enclosure that has both USB 2.0 and eSATA connectors. Is there a controller in the enclosure that is limiting my transfer speeds?

Two systems I've backed up with the drive have add-in SATA ports. The other is on the mobo. I haven't noticed any significant difference between them.

It seemed to take about the same amount of time whether I used the USB or the eSATA ports.

Is there a BIOS setting that needs to be changed?

Does it matter how the backup drive is formatted?

Thanks for the help.

 

[GhislainG]

I use several eSATA drives and they are very close to an internal drive. I always format them using NTFS, but I presume that you did the same because FAT32 limits the file size to 4GB.

What's the performance like if you copy a single large file (4GB or more) to the external drive? Is your system powerful enough to not be a bottleneck when the backup software compresses files? Is the USB cable disconnected from both the enclosure and the system?

 

[BlueCat57]

I use several eSATA drives and they are very close to an internal drive. I always format them using NTFS, but I presume that you did the same because FAT32 limits the file size to 4GB.

What's the performance like if you copy a single large file (4GB or more) to the external drive? Is your system powerful enough to not be a bottleneck when the backup software compresses files? Is the USB cable disconnected from both the enclosure and the system?

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My impression of file copies is that they are speedy. I'd have to time them. I've used that drive to copy files from one system to another and it seemed speedy.

Not sure how you would define "powerful enough." The systems are about 3 years old and the CPUs are above 2GHz with 4GB of RAM installed. I'm usine 32-bit Windows 7. All the drives are SATA.

It is possible that the internal drives are the bottleneck since they are reused laptop drives.

One is a SATA 150, 8MB cache, 5400rpm, 80GB. I checked to see what 150 means and it appears that it is a slower version. I wouldn't think it is "hours" slower, but that might be the answer.

The other is, well I don't know but it is probably similar. Funny how you think you've got the info but don't. I'll have to run a Belarc on all my systems again because as I'm looking through my files the reports I have aren't current.

 

[GhislainG]

It is possible that the internal drives are the bottleneck since they are reused laptop drives.

Laptop drives are rather slow. SATA 150 = SATA 1.

When copying files, Windows 7 indicates how fast the transfer occurs. On a good drive, you should expect 80MB/s or more if nothing else slows down the system. A laptop drive will be slower.

 

[BlueCat57]

Best answer selected by BlueCat57.