That's quite a subject line, eh?
I have recently purchased several new eSata external hard drives because I've been using my existing USB drives more and more, and when I benchmarked them, I was aghast at how slow they were compared to internal drives.
But now in doing that, I've run into problems and I have questions relating to setting up the drive for Windows/Mac compatibility. I'll list the problems for those who might attempt the same thing.
Setup:
1) I bought two new combo eSata/USB drives:
a) Seagate FreeAgent Pro 750GB (this also has a firewire connection)
b) WD MyBook ES 500GB
2) My computer is actually PATA (and PCI rather than PCIe), so I bought:
a) SIIG eSATA II-150 PCI Controller - 2 x eSATA Serial ATA/150 External SATA External - PCI
b) SIIG 6.56 ft. eSATA to eSATA Cable Model CB-SA0211-S1
c) OKGEAR 6 ft. external SATA Cable,Black Model GC6EAK
BEWARE: The OKGear cable was cheap compared to the SIIG--4.99 versus 20.99--but it doesn't work. I had to order another SIIG cable.
Problems and Benchmarks:
a) The Seagate drive benchmarks at twice the bandwidth under eSATA than it does under USB. However, performance shows to be quite variable under HDTune.
a) Under USB, I am getting 10-11MB/sec data transfer
b) Under eSata, for the Seagate Freeagent drive, I am getting 10-31 MB/Sec data transfer, avg is 20. And the performance is quite variable. In fact, rerunning the benchmark again, I just saw a low of 5.1 MB/s!
c) Under eSata, for the WD drive, I am getting 39-53MB/Sec with an avg speed of 50. Furthermore, it's pretty solid and consistent.
d) Since I only have one working cable, I am currently set up to use the Freeagent as eSata and the WD as USB. That's mainly because I started using the FreeAgent drive first and copied all my images to it. But: I have had one occurrence of the nasty Delayed Write failed with it. I don't even know what app was trying to write, or even
Here are the charts showing this incredible difference:
 
Questions:
1) Mac/Windows Compatibility. My new WD drive came formatted to Fat32. I was going to reformat it to NTFS, but then I started thinking about my upcoming "transition" to MacOS. And from what I read, MacOS has problems with NTFS drives, being able to read it but not write it, and sometimes having trouble mounting it. So it would seem logical to stay under Fat32. But that's ironic, since from what I understand, NTFS was designed to support streams, which better handles Mac file forks. So then I started wondering:
a) is it thus better to keep the drive as a FAT32 drive?
b) will the mac have problems reading a 500GB FAT32 partition
c) Will it really be usable on the Mac, or will I end up having problems because of the lack of file fork support (instead ending up with weird files in my folder (copies of the forks), as I've sometimes seen the Mac do)? (I will no doubt have both environments, but I will be networked, so I can probably leave the drive attached to either the Mac or the PC and access over the network)
d) What apps on the PC (besides viruses/trojans) are actually using streams? How about the Adobe apps?
2) Drive Performance: Anyone else have a eSata freeAgentPro drive they can benchmark to see if bad performance is normal?
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