Studio XPS 8000, eSATA port

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Hi

I'm still not sure of this assistance vs help from the community but here goes..

I have a Dell Studio XPS 8000. It has USB 2.0 ports. When I do an image backup of my 1 TB disk it takes 4 hours (including verify). I started investigating USB 3.0 which would require a "card" but noted I have a eSATA port on the back. Seeing that I have an 1 TB external disk which is 2.0, I would ned a new external disk if I went USB 3.0 or used eSATA. Am I missing something? eSATA would be a much faster connection than USB 2.0 and I wouldn't need a new card (if I even have room for card). If I did have an extra slot it would be more useful for a wireless card.

Re: When I do an image backup of my 1 TB disk it takes 4 hours (including verify)

the slow process may be partially due to usb 2.0 but also related to old cpu and ram in XPS 8000. 
assuming you create back up in external hdd connected via usb2.0, consider doing back up on internal second sata hdd or even better sata ssd.

Please don't tell me your Iomega drive is a Zip drive..!  

You may also be limited by the amount of RAM installed in the Studio XPS 8000 (max is 16 GB) and how much unnecessary junk is running in the background that's hogging RAM.

eSATA is old tech, so I wouldn't invest any $ in that.

Well it is an Iomega but definitely not a zip drive.  Speccy actually shows it as a Samsung drive.

If my RAM (8 Gb) and CPU (Intel Core i7 860 @ 2.80GHz) throttles the speed transfer, wouldn't my system come to a crawl when doing a backup? It will show at 240 Mb/s transfer speed no matter what else is running on the system.

What is being suggested is that nothing I do (use eSATA or add a USB 3.0 card) will improve the speed transfer. I find that hard to believe. eSATA may be older technology but it may be the only technology that will speed up data transfers on my existing system which I don't need to replace because it works fine other than the 4 hour backups.

I have always failed to see the point of doing backups to internal disks. I am an old school DEC system manager and was always told to do backups to external media so they could be kept offsite and available to be used on a replacement system.

The original question wasn't why my backups take 4 hours, it was would the time be shortened if I used the eSATA port (cheapest option) or installed a 3.0 USB PCie card, both of which are cheaper than buying a new system.

You'd have to find out if the eSATA port is eSATAp and can provide power to your external drive, unless the drive has its own external power adapter. Otherwise you may be limited to using USB3.

Then there's the issue of the PCI-e bus. Your video card is in the x16 PCI-e slot, so that only leaves you with an available x1 slot for a USB3 card. According to the specs, that x1 is PCI-e Gen 2 with bidirectional speed @ 500 MB/s, ~2x faster than your USB2 connection.

BTW, Are you doing full backups of the 1T HDD? Would incremental backups be faster and more efficient since they only back up recently changed files? And Medium file compression using intelligent sector copy will take less time and processing power.

Re: I am an old school DEC system manager and was always told to do backups to external media so they could be kept offsite and available to be used on a replacement system.

I realized internal sata and external sata are similar ideas to speed up data transfer compared to usb2.0.  Internal sata hdd can be disconnected from system power (while remaining inside chassis) after back up.  If you are concerned about possible fire or theft destroying system or portability, then off site back up makes sense.  most people do back up concerned about hdd failure.

USB 3.0 external hard drive speed won't exceed 500 MB/s, while eSATA external hard drive can exceed that speed.  Like SATA interface, eSATA speed can be up to 600 MB/s (6 Gbps) at most (older versions' speed just reaches 150 MB/s or 300MB/s).

"USB 3.0 external hard drive speed won't exceed 500 MB/s, while eSATA external hard drive can exceed that speed. Like SATA interface, eSATA speed can be up to 600 MB/s (6 Gbps) at most (older versions' speed just reaches 150 MB/s or 300MB/s)."

Thanks for this. One question to clarify things, MB/s vs Mb/s. My data transfer speed on backups is shows as about 240 Mb/s and you are showing MB/s. Again, being old school (or just plain old), one is megabits per second and one is megabytes per second and there are 8 bits to a byte. That would mean that even using your "older versions" I could be ramping up my speed at least 5 fold (150 vs 30 MBs). Are my assumptions correct?

As to a previous post, if I were to purchase an eSATA external drive it would have it's own power, just like my Iomega non-zip drive and it would have a SATA port so I could connect it to the eSATA port on my PC.

eSata was nice 10-years ago. If you could use it now (with existing components), go ahead. 

However, it has some draw-backs. It's also a bit kludgy and fragile. It has been obsoleted/depreciated since USB-3.0 (and faster external-interfaces like ThunderBolt-3) became a reality.

Not sure I would mess with upgrading such an old machine (since what you have is working). However, If you must upgrade, go to USB-3.0 . Also, any external USB-3.0 drives you buy will still work with the new machine when you buy it.

Like SATA interface, eSATA speed can be up to 600 MB/s (6 Gbps) at most (older versions' speed just reaches 150 MB/s or 300MB/s)."

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Never heard of eSata running faster than 150 MB/s (ie fast as SATA-I ... the first one from years ago).

although the eSATA2 interface can theoretically achieve a transmission rate of 3 Gbps, in practice, due to the internal transmission rate of the hard disk and the constraints of the motherboard, the actual data transmission may be between 1.5 Gbps and 3 Gbps (1500Mbps and 3000Mbps), but still higher than USB2.0 transfer rate (up to 480Mb/s).

Internal SATA-I, SATA-II, and SATA-III run at 150, 300, and 600 respectfully.

There is no such thing as eSATA2 . External-SATA (ie eSATA) only runs at 150.

Re: OP XPS 8000 has P55 chipset, which supports 

• 6 SATA 3 Gbit/s ports

motherboard back panel esata port likely commensurate with internal sata speed.

If in another PC, e.g., XPS 8300 which has H67 chipset that has two sets of SATA ports: four that support 3Gbps operation, and two that support 6Gbps. If use esata bracket with internal sata cable connected to the two faster sata ports, theoretically you get 6 Gbit/s at esata.

In any case, what I understand is that if my transfer (write) speed using USB 2.0 is about 240 Mbps when the max is 480 Mbps, if I were to use the eSATA port my speed should 3 to 6 times faster (1.5 Gbit/s, 3.0 Gbit/s}. Most current eSATA external disks have eSATA, USB 2.0 and USB 3.0+ connectors so if it could be used on an updated system.

I may look at incremental or, more likely, differential backups but if I can cut my full image backup to a third or sixth, I would do full images more often. On my DEC system (Digital Equipment for the younger crowd) I would do differential because when restoring, you only had to deal with 2 backup files, image and differential. Of course, back then, the backup medium was tape and disks didn't have terabytes of data.

Currently I do important file/folder backups daily to another external disk (Seagate) using USB 2.0 (similar speed) but speed isn't that important in that case.

more likely, differential backups but if I can cut my full image backup to a third or sixth, I would do full images more often. On my DEC system (Digital Equipment for the younger crowd) I would do differential because when restoring, you only had to deal with 2 backup files, image and differential. Of course, back then, the backup medium was tape and disks didn't have terabytes of data.

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I like Differentials. Exactly, only 2 files required to fully restore.

Monthly, Full-Backup on the 1st.
Daily Differentials (very fast)

And every year I keep the December Full backups for a few years (just in case).

I do this with Macrium Reflect (with Verify after creation). It also takes care of it's own house-keeping ... deleting the oldest files and only keeping 3 months of backup-files on the external USB-3.0 HDD. It could also be to a folder on a NAS. Windows-10 sleeps (S3) and wakes up fine to do it at 3am.