More performance testing

Here's a puzzle for the geeks amongst us...

I happen to have a mSATA SSD (it's actually the primary drive for Aether) and a pile of various adapters and cables which lets me hook it up to pretty much anything. So having stuck a USB 3.0 card in Nyx I thought I'd do some speed testing, and the results were a little surprising. The test drive is a Plextor 256GB M5M mSATA with a rated sequential read performance of 540MB/s which is faster than anything Nyx can manage so it should be a good candidate for some experimenting with an old copy of HD Tune.

( Let's do some experimenting )

So the puzzle is this: why is eSATA so slow?

Curiouser and curiouser...

One thing I spotted during my performance testing is using USB 3.0 caused one core to be pegged at 100% while accessing the drive. I didn't notice this with USB 2.0 or with eSATA (or when performance testing the internal SATA SSD), so I wonder if the USB 3.0 performance is CPU-limited? Time for more experimentation.

( More experimentation! )

I do have newer drivers to play with for both the USB and the eSATA controllers so those are next on the list to try.

Result!

So did the newer drivers help?

( Even more experimenting! )

And with that, the puzzle is solved! Now to put the laptop back together (did I mention I was using the SSD from it)...