[geeks] The new IPC/LX, from Dell?

[Joshua Boyd]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 01:02:54PM -0500, Lionel Peterson wrote:

> eSATA is the unfiltered, unaltered native connection between drive and  
> controller. FW and USB add overhead and impose limits on performance.  
> Informal 'ghost' tests have 30 Gig system images taking 10-12 minutes on 
> eSATA, and twice as long on USB 2.0. I'd put FW between those two,  
> closer to eSATA, but not the same.

So, a 30 gig ghost image in 10 minutes is 50 MB/s on write.  I would say
that it is clear that eSATA isn't the limiting factor, and so FW800
could be just as fast (maybe faster but probably not), and FW400 is
probably only slightly slower at maybe 38 MB/s if the same drive was
taken from the eSATA case and placed in a good FW400 case.

At 12 minutes, that datarate would suggest that the eSATA drive could
run neck to neck with what a FW400 drive, since the eSATA is not doing
the best it could probably do.

USB 2.0 may be about half the speed, but if it were me doing this, I'd
want to know why the eSATA wasn't past 3x and closer to 4x the speed of
USB 2.0