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From: Mark F on 9 Sep 2008 13:28
On Mon, 08 Sep 2008 13:57:34 -0700, Charliec
<charliec(a)invalid.address.com> wrote:

> I purchased the external WD Essential 320GB to replace my external WD
> 80GB drive. When launching programs from the Essential, it is very
> slow compared to the WD 80GB drive I replaced. Both drives are
> external and connected via a USB2.0 port.
>
> What can I do to speed up the access to the program launching and
> other accessing to the WD Essential 320GB external drive?
I don't think you can speed it up, although there is a chance
that using a different USB interface would speed things up.
(I assume you are using USB 2.0 - I am referring to performance
differences with different USB 2.0 interfaces, either on the
same machine or another machine.)

I had some film scanned to disk and it came back on a
Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB
UPC 7 18037 12270 0 R/N: ADC
Order
WDH1U10000N
Model
WD10000H1U-00

The drive inside (I open up just about everything AFTER I test it -
now that we know it works, lets see why.)
seems to be
WD P/N: WD10EAVS-00D780
MDL: WD10EAVS-00D7B0
DATE: 24 JUN 2008
(I didn't take things apart far enough to see if the
disk is a SATA test connected to an independent
SATA-to-USB converter, or if the electronics is
"melded together".)
(Assuming that I copied the model number correctly after
prying the My Book apart, the drive is a Western Digital
Caviar GP WD10EACS 1TB 5400 to 7200 RPM
16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM
Perhaps what appears to be variable speed affects the performance.)

So it is a fairly recent drive and should have reasonable performance.
However, I found that it performed poorly for a SATA drive connected
to USB 2.0. (I also know from experience that USB 2.0 is typically
1/2 the speed of IEEE-1394a, and typically around 1/4 the speed
of an eSATA connection to a SATA disk.)

Here are the details:
When I copied from the My Book Essential it only
ran at about 15MB/second. (I typically see 22-25MB/second for
USB 2.0 to SATA [as was the case here], and about 40-45MB/second
for input from IEEE-1394a, and 60 MB/second for input from eSATA.)

In other words, the drive performed poorly compared to other
drives with USB 2.0/SATA interfaces, and USB 2.0 only runs
at 1/2 of IEEE-1393a, 1/3 of what I can see for SATA copies.
(My SATA adapter is on a PCI card, so my SATA-to-SATA copy operations
are limited by the PCI bus speed.)

HD Tach and HD Tune also showed low speeds compared to other
USB 2.0/SATA disk external boxes. The numbers were about
15MB/second for HD Tune 2.53 and 17MB/second for
HD Tach RW version 3.0.0. (I think the performance difference
is due to HD Tune using a smaller read block size than HD Tach.)

I used a (six year old) Gateway 700S 2.4 MHz, 512MB, Windows
XP Professional with Service Pack 2 system for all of the
tests and for the copy of the data files from the
WD My Book Essential.

(In my case, I suggested to the company that did the film scanning
that they try a Western Digital My Book Home Edition, which has
USB 2.0, IEEE-1394a, and eSATA if they couldn't get Studio
Edition's formatted for Windows instead of Mac. However the
company would have to weigh evaluating another disk type for their
use as compared what probably would only allow overnight
copies completing faster.)
>
> Thanks for any tips/suggestions/
>
> Charliec
> ******************************************************
> Charliec
From: Charliec on 9 Sep 2008 14:01
On 9 Sep 2008 03:46:16 GMT, Arno Wagner <me(a)privacy.net> wrote:

>Previously Charliec <charliec(a)invalid.address.com> wrote:
>> I purchased the external WD Essential 320GB to replace my external WD
>> 80GB drive. When launching programs from the Essential, it is very
>> slow compared to the WD 80GB drive I replaced. Both drives are
>> external and connected via a USB2.0 port.
>
>> What can I do to speed up the access to the program launching and
>> other accessing to the WD Essential 320GB external drive?
>
>You cannot really. However, you may have a misconfiguration
>or other error that you can clean up. Check whether the device
>is actually running as USB 2.0.
>
>Arno

I'm not totally up on some of these things - how does one check the
drive to see if it is running as USB 2.0?
Thanks
******************************************************
Charliec
From: Charliec on 9 Sep 2008 14:03
On Tue, 09 Sep 2008 06:15:27 -0400, Bob Willard
<BobwBSGS(a)TrashThis.comcast.net> wrote:

>Charliec wrote:
>
>> I purchased the external WD Essential 320GB to replace my external WD
>> 80GB drive. When launching programs from the Essential, it is very
>> slow compared to the WD 80GB drive I replaced. Both drives are
>> external and connected via a USB2.0 port.
>>
>> What can I do to speed up the access to the program launching and
>> other accessing to the WD Essential 320GB external drive?
>>
>> Thanks for any tips/suggestions/
>>
>> Charliec
>> ******************************************************
>> Charliec
>
>FWIW, I measured the read speed of my 500GB MyBook, using HDtach, at
>~29 MB/s across the whole 500GB. USB 2.0 on a 3GHz P4 under XP SP3.

I will get Hdtach and try it - will compare to your results.
Charliec
******************************************************
Charliec
From: Charliec on 9 Sep 2008 14:06
On Tue, 9 Sep 2008 04:04:19 -0700 (PDT), "mscotgrove(a)aol.com"
<mscotgrove(a)aol.com> wrote:

>On Sep 9, 11:15�am, Bob Willard <BobwB...(a)TrashThis.comcast.net>
>wrote:
>> Charliec wrote:
>> > I purchased the external WD Essential 320GB to replace my external WD
>> > 80GB drive. �When launching programs from the Essential, it is very
>> > slow compared to the WD 80GB drive I replaced. �Both drives are
>> > external and connected via a USB2.0 port.
>>
>> > What can I do to speed up the access to the program launching and
>> > other accessing to the WD Essential 320GB external drive?
>>
>> > Thanks for any tips/suggestions/
>>
>> > Charliec
>> > ******************************************************
>> > Charliec
>>
>> FWIW, I measured the read speed of my 500GB MyBook, using HDtach, at
>> ~29 MB/s across the whole 500GB. �USB 2.0 on a 3GHz P4 under XP SP3.
>> --
>> Cheers, Bob
>
>Is the new drive FAT32 or NTFS. Some drives are still shipped as
>FAT32 to be Mac compatible
It was shipped as FAT32, I reformatted to NTFS upon installing
>
>Do you have the drive properties set for performance or quick
>removal? Quick removal can be slow
>
I have it set to "Optimize for Performance"
>
>Michael
>www.cnwrecovery.com
******************************************************
Charliec
From: Arno Wagner on 9 Sep 2008 14:21
Previously Charliec <charliec(a)invalid.address.com> wrote:
> On 9 Sep 2008 03:46:16 GMT, Arno Wagner <me(a)privacy.net> wrote:

>>Previously Charliec <charliec(a)invalid.address.com> wrote:
>>> I purchased the external WD Essential 320GB to replace my external WD
>>> 80GB drive. When launching programs from the Essential, it is very
>>> slow compared to the WD 80GB drive I replaced. Both drives are
>>> external and connected via a USB2.0 port.
>>
>>> What can I do to speed up the access to the program launching and
>>> other accessing to the WD Essential 320GB external drive?
>>
>>You cannot really. However, you may have a misconfiguration
>>or other error that you can clean up. Check whether the device
>>is actually running as USB 2.0.
>>
>>Arno

> I'm not totally up on some of these things - how does one check the
> drive to see if it is running as USB 2.0?
> Thanks
> ******************************************************
> Charliec

You can copy a large file to/from it. If it gives you
something < 2MB/sec, then it runns as USB1. With USB2.0
you should get > 15MB/s.

Arno

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