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Esata Red Station transferring at half the speed of USB 3

Alex Kiritz

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I have two Redmag Mini Stations. One is eSata, the other is USB 3. Copying files using the Esata station happens at about 115 MB/s. With the USB 3.0 one it happens at 215 MB/s. The eSata station is plugged into a Sata III port directly on the motherboard with a fat cable. I'm running Windows Server 2012. Any ideas?
 
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Check your system settings, it seems as if your eSATA red reader is negotiating at 1.5 Gb/s or is on a shared 3 Gb/s SATA lane, or you have it powered off a USB2 port and it doesn't have enough juice. I don't believe the current red SSD reader will negotiate beyond 3 Gb/s, but that should still handle up to 215-220 MB/s as long as its the only device on the lane/channel.

You also might pickup a decent USB3 to eSATA adapter, the red eSATA reader will cap out around 150-160 MB/s but its better than 90-100 MB/s on a shared eSATA 3 Gb/s or 1.5 Gb/s lane.
 
Check your system settings, it seems as if your eSATA red reader is negotiating at 1.5 Gb/s or is on a shared 3 Gb/s SATA lane, or you have it powered off a USB2 port and it doesn't have enough juice. I don't believe the current red SSD reader will negotiate beyond 3 Gb/s, but that should still handle up to 215-220 MB/s as long as its the only device on the lane/channel.

You also might pickup a decent USB3 to eSATA adapter, the red eSATA reader will cap out around 150-160 MB/s but its better than 90-100 MB/s on a shared eSATA 3 Gb/s or 1.5 Gb/s lane.

Shoot. I specifically got the eSata one instead of USB 3 because I thought they'd be faster. Thanks for your help.
 
I typically use the sonnet thunderbolt express34 adapter with the eSATA 6 Gb Pro express34 card, and I get around 215-220 MB/s with my red eSATA SSD reader, as long as I'm going to a fast enough raid or SSD from my MBPR. If I use my tower system, the eSATA 6 Gb PCIe card I use has a shared lane and will run at 215-220 MB/s unless a second drive is attached, then the red SSD reader and the drive each cap out around 100-110 MB/s because they share the lane. Many motherboards and tower systems natively share lanes between varius PCIe slots and eSATA or USB3 ports, there's probably a resource conflict or shared lane somewhere in your system.
 
It's acting really weird. The drive doesn't disappear once I remove the card and acts like nothing happened until I try to open a file. The only way to get it to go away is to go device manager and scan for hardware changes, at which point it usually won't show when reinserted until I restart. At one point I was even able to open up files that were on the card I had removed.
 
That sounds like you're running the reader off an internal SATA port and you don't have hot swap enabled, or hot swap has been turned off for the eSATA port or just isn't supported on that system. Or you don't have the proper driver installed if you're using an eSATA PCIe card.
 
I did change the settings to enable hot plugging and it didn't make any difference. I may just switch to USB 3.
 
That's your speed using a single Redmag Station? Not both at the same time, correct?

Copying files using the Esata station happens at about 115 MB/s.
 
Hardly a scientific test, but I'm using eSATA and just did a 3.2GB file download/upload to test the interface (HP Elitebook 8770w, SSD drives)
Down to RED card in 8.6s, 378MB/s
Up from RED card in 4.6s, 700MB/s

using USB3 to power the redstation.

edit... suspicious caching was throwing the numbers off I copied 4 4GB files (cache seems to only help up to 4gb files, then runs out of space), download dropped to 153MB/s, upload to 215MB/s... which sounds more reasonable.
 
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The cards themselves are limited to eSata speed, around 220MB/sec

With an Atto H680 I get 12 GB's a minute to multiple destinations, as long as the multiple destinations are eSata and at least Raid 0, of course. To non-Raided drives I get about 7 GB's/minute.
 
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