Stuart James at myITforum.com

eSATA versus USB2

I make a lot of use of Virtual Server and Virtual PC (and soon Hyper-V) with my laptop and find the thing that seems to slow me down most is disk performance.  I don't have the storage on my main disk so run my virtual machines on USB 2.0 disks.  As my VMs get larger and busier the performance seems to get worse.

I therefore decided to take the plunge and get myself set up with eSATA.  I purchased the following:

eSATA ExpressCard: http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=676511

2.5" External eSATA/USB case: http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=603610 (note that this comes with all cables you need, including eSATA to eSATA)

2.5" Hard Disk: http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=773812 

Tests are performed using HD Tune 2.55 using a quick test.  It's the same disk just plugged in to a different socket so all other things (such as cache, RPM etc) are equal.

USB 2

image

eSATA

image

Quite a huge difference then on paper and I'm hoping it will make a big difference to the performance of my VMs.  I'll report back with some more subjective data on VM performance over the next few weeks.

Posted: Aug 08 2008, 01:11 PM by sjames | with 2 comment(s)

Comments

gjones said:

What tool did you use for your Disk IO test? BTW my new laptop comes with an eSata connection. :-) so 2TB for mee soon.. :-)

# August 8, 2008 4:49 PM

sjames said:

I used a free utility called HD tune http://www.hdtune.com

There are probably more advanced ones out there but it's free and seems to give a good general idea of performance across the disk.

# August 17, 2008 5:03 PM