top of page
Search
sueveynahugvau

Tips and Tricks for Optimizing Your External Serial ATA Hard Drive or External FireWire Hard Drive P



Traditional hard drives (7200 RPM) are much faster than the USB standard allows for. You can prove it by taking a decent hard drive and plugging it in natively, and testing it, and then testing it in a USB caddy.




external serial ata hard drive or an external firewire hard




Since eSATA and Firewire (400/800) are both significantly quicker than USB, I'd be willing to bet they are reasonably close in speed to what sort of speeds you'd see from a natively plugged in drive. eSATA especially - since isn't it meant to be an external version of a native sata controller?


It's hardly scientific, but my experiences with Firewire 400, 800 and USB 2 on various Intel Macs (laptops and iMacs) is that FW400 is noticeably faster than USB 2, and FW800 is getting-on for internal drive speeds.


Daily, I copy around various 16-25Gb files (virtual machines) and would always pick FW800 (or 400) over USB2. For a while I was regularly copying a 16Gb file from one FW800 to another (they were daisy-chained together) and it was just like copying between 2 internal hard drives.


Theoretically, Firewire 400 has a max speed of 400 Mbit/s and USB 2.0 has a max speed of 480 Mbit/s. However, actual usage speeds tend to differ a lot and it often depends on the external hard drive itself.


One of the big advances of FW is that it is a peer-to-peer protocol. Which means you can make a daisychain with 4 computers and 5 hard drives, and still get it to work. You can have problems when 2 systems write the same file at the same time, but FW is much more flexible.


The SAT3510U2F External Hard Drive Enclosure supports both USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 (IEEE1394a) host connections, providing the compatibility needed to create a convenient and versatile external SATA storage solution for desktop computers as well as MacBooks and Windows based laptops. Large capacity drives (tested with up to 4TB) can be used to greatly enhance your computer's storage/backup capabilities.


When you troubleshoot issues with a hard drive enclosure, there are some quick tests that you can complete to rule out potential problems. You can test to make sure that the following components are working correctly and are not the source of the issue:


SATA is the highest performance mainstream drive technology (hard drive or solid state). It is widespread and low-cost relative to comparable technologies like SAS (serial attached SCSI). Alternatives such as SAS are excellent, but very expensive compared to SATA on absolute terms, and in cost per gigabyte.


SATA speed is about double the maximum sustained speed of any single hard drive available today. While very fast, this is a limiting factor when using technologies that share a single SATA cable eg port multiplication Why.


Mac Pro users can install four internal SATA drives in the drive bays (6 with a 3rd-party bracket). An eSATA card or cards can also be installed, allowing a very large number of drives in external enclosures.


USB is the most common connection type for external devices, whether external hard drive, thumb drives, flash drives, printers, cameras, all kinds of other devices. It is extremely easy to use. Whether the computer is powered on or powered off, simply connect the cable to your device and it should be ready to be used less than 30 seconds later (depending on your computer's speed).


Serial ATA is the most common connection for internal drives in modern PCs and Macs. There can be multiple SATA ports on any one motherboard or controller card. One cable connects one hard drive to one port on the motherboard (as opposed to Parallel ATA).


An ATA hard drive that is connected to the same cable as a CD or DVD drive must be connected to the master position, with the CD or DVD drive in the slave position.M.2The M.2 connector is designed for small form factor devices, so you will mostly see it inside of tablets and laptops. This connector supports both wireless cards and SSDs, as well as NVMe commands. U.2 (SFF-8639)


G-DRIVE high-speed interface external storage systems offer the ultimate in flexibility by providing 3Gbit eSATA, FireWire 800 (FireWire 400 via included cable) and USB 2.0 ports. G-DRIVE is the perfect high-performance solution for storage intensive applications including audio/video editing, digital photography, MP3 libraries and high-speed data backup. The system features a fan-less cooling system and the latest technology 7200 RPM 3 Gbit SATA hard drives featuring spacious storage capacities with up to 32 MB of cache.


SATA (Serial AT Attachment)[a][3] is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) standard to become the predominant interface for storage devices.


As of April 2010[update], the fastest 10,000 rpm SATA hard disk drives could transfer data at maximum (not average) rates of up to 157 MB/s,[18] which is beyond the capabilities of the older PATA/133 specification and also exceeds the capabilities of SATA 1.5 Gbit/s.


Connectors and cables present the most visible differences between SATA and parallel ATA drives. Unlike PATA, the same connectors are used on 3.5-inch SATA hard disks (for desktop and server computers) and 2.5-inch disks (for portable or small computers).[47]


A special eSATA connector is specified for external devices, and an optionally implemented provision for clips to hold internal connectors firmly in place. SATA drives may be plugged into SAS controllers and communicate on the same physical cable as native SAS disks, but SATA controllers cannot handle SAS disks.


The SATA standard defines a data cable with seven conductors (three grounds and four active data lines in two pairs) and 8 mm wide wafer connectors on each end. SATA cables can have lengths up to 1 metre (3.3 ft), and connect one motherboard socket to one hard drive. PATA ribbon cables, in comparison, connect one motherboard socket to one or two hard drives, carry either 40 or 80 wires, and are limited to 45 centimetres (18 in) in length by the PATA specification; however, cables up to 90 centimetres (35 in) are readily available. Thus, SATA connectors and cables are easier to fit in closed spaces and reduce obstructions to air cooling. Although they are more susceptible to accidental unplugging and breakage than PATA, users can purchase cables that have a locking feature, whereby a small (usually metal) spring holds the plug in the socket.


SATA connector on a 3.5-inch hard drive, with data pins on the left and power pins on the right. The two different pin lengths ensure a specific mating order; the longer lengths are ground pins and make contact first.


SATA specifies a different power connector than the four-pin Molex connector used on Parallel ATA (PATA) devices (and earlier small storage devices, going back to ST-506 hard disk drives and even to floppy disk drives that predated the IBM PC). It is a wafer-type connector, like the SATA data connector, but much wider (fifteen pins versus seven) to avoid confusion between the two. Some early SATA drives included the four-pin Molex power connector together with the new fifteen-pin connector, but most SATA drives now have only the latter.


The micro SATA connector (sometimes called uSATA or μSATA[55]) originated with SATA 2.6, and is intended for 1.8-inch hard disk drives. There is also a micro data connector, similar in appearance but slightly thinner than the standard data connector.


Aimed at the consumer market, eSATA enters an external storage market served also by the USB and FireWire interfaces. The SATA interface has certain advantages. Most external hard-disk-drive cases with FireWire or USB interfaces use either PATA or SATA drives and "bridges" to translate between the drives' interfaces and the enclosures' external ports; this bridging incurs some inefficiency. Some single disks can transfer 157 MB/s during real use,[18] about four times the maximum transfer rate of USB 2.0 or FireWire 400 (IEEE 1394a) and almost twice as fast as the maximum transfer rate of FireWire 800. The S3200 FireWire 1394b specification reaches around 400 MB/s (3.2 Gbit/s), and USB 3.0 has a nominal speed of 5 Gbit/s. Some low-level drive features, such as S.M.A.R.T., may not operate through some USB[58] or FireWire or USB+FireWire bridges; eSATA does not suffer from these issues provided that the controller manufacturer (and its drivers) presents eSATA drives as ATA devices, rather than as SCSI devices, as has been common with Silicon Image, JMicron, and NVIDIA nForce drivers for Windows Vista. In those cases, SATA drives do not have low-level features accessible.


The "force 150" switch (or equivalent) is also useful for attaching SATA 3 Gbit/s hard drives to SATA controllers on PCI cards, since many of these controllers (such as the Silicon Image chips) run at 3 Gbit/s, even though the PCI bus cannot reach 1.5 Gbit/s speeds. This can cause data corruption in operating systems that do not specifically test for this condition and limit the disk transfer speed.[citation needed]


Many hard drive enclosures have Firewire, USB, Thunderbolt or a combination of interfaces for connecting the hard drive to your computer. Any of these interfaces will work fine for backing up and safeguarding your data. We generally recommend purchasing an enclosure that offers multiple interface options (e.g. Thunderbolt+USB). If your Mac does not offer native USB 3.0 support (e.g. it's older than 2012), a USB device may boot your Mac, but performance will be considerably slower than your Mac's internal hard drive. 2ff7e9595c


0 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


bottom of page