Internal notebook ATA100 vs USB2 vs eSATA

Holy hot hannah, batman.

I requested an external drive for my poor-little 1.6ghz pentium m notebook. (Dell Latitude D610 w/2gigs of RAM)

The internal drive (upgraded from a 4200rpm 30gig model to a 120gig 5400rpm 8mb cache seagate) was still slow. And when I tried to run a vm onboard...look out. Empires rose and crumbled to dust in the time it took to boot 'em. Everything else slowed to a crawl as the host OS and VM duked it out for access to the drive.

So I wanted an external drive. Well, for virtual machines as well as local backup.

At first I thought a nice, simple (big honkin) usb2. Then I thought "hmm...wonder how much faster an external SATA (eSATA) drive would be?)

After a bit of research, I selected the following. (all hail newegg!)
VANTEC NST-360SU-BK 3.5" eSATA + USB2.0 Enclosure
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 (500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA Hard Drive
VANTEC UGT-ST350CB SATA PCMCIA Card

Everything went together like a charm. On a whim, I decided to run Simpli Software's awesome HDTach against my internal drive, the external drive using it's eSATA connection, and the external drive using it's USB2 option.

Note the cpu utilization differences (as well as the fact that the eSATA option is faster than the internal...guess that PCMCIA bus can move some data..!)

Internal drive (Seagate ST9120821A - ATA100, 120gig, 5400rpm, 8mb cache):
Average read speed: 31.4MB/sec
CPU Utilization: 5%

External Drive, (7200rpm, 16mb cache) using usb2 (onboard)
Average read speed: 27.3MB/sec
CPU Utilization: 29%

External Drive, (7200rpm, 16mb cache) using eSATA interface
Average read speed: 56.2MB/sec
CPU Utilization: 0%


HDTach results:

The notebook's internal drive:




The external drive, USB2:




The external drive, eSATA