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From: Rod Speed on 30 Aug 2009 19:10
Paul wrote
> Rod Speed wrote

>>> Paul's experiments and results seem to directly contradict your opinion / comments.

>> And your own dont. Yours are more useful because its the total time to copy the file using a stopwatch etc that
>> matters, not what HDTunes shows.

> If you read my test results, they were done with a stopwatch. The results of real file transfers were compared to
> HDTune results, and the results are equal.

Pity about the widespread reports of problems with
Vista file copying and his results when comparing
what True Image and Vista achieve on his hardware.

ALL you have shown is that the Vista file copy
problem isnt seen on your hardware with XP.

> My test also proved I was wrong, and WinXP actually does do overlapping file I/O when copying files.

He isnt even using WinXP himself.

> (I'm sure I've seen other Windows OSes, where file I/O is not overlapped.)

Thats unlikely to be the problem given that its a
tad unlikely that XP is overlapped and Vista isnt.

> I tested from the DOS prompt, and also tried Explorer copy and paste, as well as giving Robocopy a try, and they all
> achieved the same stopwatch time. Consistent with the transfer rate possible in the small area of the disk I defined
> for the test.

Sure, but it aint the OS he is using.


From: Smarty on 31 Aug 2009 00:06
"Ato_Zee" <ato_zee(a)hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:ZThmm.19703$4f4.8803(a)newsfe11.ams2...
>
> On 29-Aug-2009, "Rod Speed" <rod.speed.aaa(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > Is there anything I can do to speed things up?
>
> Upping your pagefile, possibly putting it on a differet drive
> (if you have more than one), and making the pagefile a
> fixed size might help.


After several hours of experimentation, benchmarking, tweaking of processes
and services, and comparing performances of several pieces of file copy
software (some of which actually replaces the Vista copy file code), I have
come to learn that I can sustain much faster file transfers at the nominal
average speed of my drives and controllers by changing the pagefile
settings, as Ato-Zee had initially recommended.

I am now seeing about 70 MB/sec speeds versus my prior 23MB/sec, essentially
a 3 to 1 improvement. This translates into many many hours of time saved for
the roughly 4 TBytes I am about to move onto the video server disks in
roughly 6 GByte chunks.

The key modification was to move the pagefile from either of the source or
destination disks. Apparently Windows wants to use a lot of virtual memory
during the file copy, and paging to either the source or destination drive
forces much more latency and thrashing. I am saying "apparently" since this
is my conclusion from seeing the speed improvement, but I do not know enough
about the internals of Vista to know this for a fact.

Thanks very much to all for your help in solving this problem.

From: JR Weiss on 31 Aug 2009 00:21
Smarty wrote:

>> I just ventured into eSATA. I found out the [relatively] hard way
>> via an allegedly bad cable and an RMA. However, the fine techies at
>> IcyDock set me straight!
>>
>> It turns out that if a SATA controller (e.g., the ICH9R) does not
>> have hot-swap capability, the eSATA device must be seen and
>> enumerated by the BIOS at boot-up. Otherwise you run into those
>> speed problems you noticed, if the device is recognized at all...
>>
>> Try this. Set up and power up all eSATA devices on all your
>> computers. Reboot them all. Check the BIOS screens as they falsh
>> by (if possible) to see if all the eSATA devices are enumerated.
>> Retest the transfer rates. You might be pleasantly surprised.
>
> I did indeed have the very problem arise which you refer to, and one
> of my machines (a Dell XPS420) mis-manages the one and only external
> eSATA port it has just as you describe. I added my own SATA
> controller cards rather than suffer with the (yet unfixed) Dell
> issue, and have not seen this type of slowdown since.
>
> The drives which are internal to the computers are present at boot
> time, are correctly enumerated by the BIOS when the machine boots,
> and still have this same speed problem. My external eSATA ports,
> provided by add-in cards, are actually capable of hot-swap, and do
> not to seem to care whether the drive was there or not at boot time
> since they (usually) mount and dismount external eSATA drives
> whenever I chose to. The "Safely Remove" feature seems to work
> properly.
>
> Most important is the fact that the transfer speeds stay at this 25
> MByte/sec rate regardless of whether the drive was there at boot
> time, added later on, dismounted and then remounted, etc.
>
> It is most frustrating to me since my USB2 drives perform at about
> the same transfer rates..........25 Mbytes/sec give or take. This is
> NOT what I was expecting SATA or eSATA to provide, and hence my post
> to this newsgroup.

Is it possible the controller cards or PCIe bus is saturated? Do the
eSATA controllers have on-board processing, or do they use the CPU?
From: Ato_Zee on 31 Aug 2009 06:59

> >> > Is there anything I can do to speed things up?
> >
> > Upping your pagefile, possibly putting it on a differet drive
> > (if you have more than one), and making the pagefile a
> > fixed size might help.

> The key modification was to move the pagefile from either
> of the source or destination disks.

Don't know why, but I had the same problem, and found the
improvement by experimenting. In the process also found
that the SATA cards I tried did not work as well as
motherboard SATA ports.
I ended up using a s/h eBay Intel Extreme processor,
with 4GB Crucial. Moving the pagefile was part of the
tuning. Also found an eBay adapter that puts a
motherboard SATA port on the back as an eSATA
port, all it does is a connector change.
Now the 1TB eSATA drive goes as fast as the
onboard drives.
From: Peter on 31 Aug 2009 09:33
In article <h7c25a$nqi$1(a)news.eternal-september.org>, nobody(a)nobody.com
says...
> I have 3 PCs which each have a variety of internal SATA drives, and all of
> which have external eSATA ports. The external eSATA ports were either
> factory-provided (Dell) or added by me with controller cards from Addonics
> and Rosewill with PCI-Express or PCI interfaces.
>
> Regardless of which computer and which internal or external drive I use (and
> there are 14 drives in total I have tried), the nominal transfer rates I am
> getting are roughly 25 to 30 Mbytes/sec. I will occasionally see a brief
> transfer rate of 70-90 Mbytes/second, but this rate only lasts for a very
> short time, I assume until some buffer in RAM has either emptied or filled.
>
> The machines are all 32 bit Windows, both Vista and XP, in all cases with
> latest patches and service packs.
>
> I assume that SATA speeds closer to the theoretical limit should be
> achievable, but have never seen even remotely close to this type of
> performance. In fact, this type of performance I experience is much more
> similar to USB2 and Firewire 400.
>
> Is there anything I can do to speed things up? Files I read and write are
> nominally long sequential transfers of roughly 6 GByte size, in all cases to
> and from NTFS volumes / partitions.
>
> Thanks in advance for any advice.
>
>
Have you checked the transfer mode for the ports in Device Manager. Had
I guy who's SATA drive was only set to PIO mode and was getting just
30MB/s transfer rates max. May even have been less than this. Just
removed the controller and allowed XP to re-install and everything was
fixed.

Just go to device manager->click on the + by IDE ATA/ATAPI controller-
>then right click on each controller and select properties, then click
on advanced settings and ensure that Current Transfer Mode is Ultra DMA

--
Pete Ives
Remove All_stRESS before sending me an email
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