[OT] Connect external hard drive to internal SATA port?

You either get a USB-3 socket on your PC or you need a SATA drive and an eSata port on your computer. There's no "adapter cable" like you seem to be hoping for.

Many external drives are a regular SATA drive inside the housing, with a SATA to USB adapter board attached. If you open up the housing and remove the adaptor you can extract the drive to use in an internal drive slot. This is called 'shucking' - search for that and your drive model to find a video of someone doing it (it can be destructive to the casing due to fragile plastic clips). Some 2.5" drives don't have a SATA connector inside, in which case you're out of luck.

However, I would be surprised if you were running into the limits of USB. USB 3 Gen 1 (formerly 3.0) is 5Gbps, SATA 3 is 6Gbps, but most hard drives can't saturate the SATA port for very long - I would expect ballpark

So unless you have the drive plugged into a USB 2 port I wouldn't expect a speedup of plugging it into a SATA port.

If it's an SSD then things are different.

Theo

I would like to avoid taking apart the external hard drive enclosure because it's a neat package and is very convenient to plug via USB when performance doesn't matter.

The bottleneck when its attached via USB is probably due to the chipset of my creaky motherboard (AMD Athlon) rather than USB technical limits.

You /are/ plugging into a (usually blue) USB3 port? Noticing the xpost, I assume it's not actually a WinXP computer?

The cable provided with the extrnal drives goes from USB 3.0 Powered-B (on the device) to USB 3.0 type-A which is plugged into a USB 2.0 type-A port on the creaky old XP computer. Yes!

My guess is there's a throughput bottleneck due to the main board's USB bus. That's why I want to try going direct from the external hard drive to a SATA port.

USB2 is always going to be a bottleneck.

Got a spare PCIe slot? This card will let you use an internal SATA port as an external eSATAp port.

Then you could use an eSATAp to SATA 22 pin cable to connect the drive

That's over complicated! The board in the link you gave provides USB3.0 sockets, so just plug the existing drive and cable into such a board.

John

It likely won't help since the data will still be going through the slow usb chip in the drive enclosure. You cant access the data faster than the slowest chip. Get rid of the usb enclosure. That assumes that the drive is sata and not an unusable proprietary drive like in WD housings. I took my housings apart using a piece of thin plastic and and a small Phillips screw driver.

If your motherboard has USB 2 ports you can speed up data transfer by installing a USB 3 expansion card. The card will need to match the type of expansion port on your motherboard.

The disk inside this enclosure, has only a USB connector on it. You can't remove the USB, because it's on the drive controller PCB. It's not a sub-assembly, like in past years.

You should state the *exact* model of product, to get details.

Otherwise, someone will have to write an article about all the forms these things take.

The un-shuckable drives are typically those 5TB max, 15mm high ones.

Here is a drive, where the USB connector is the only connector offered.

Paul

Thank you for the details. The external drive is a Seagate Backup Plus Slim which teardown videos confirm has its USB 3.0 socket integrated on its controller board.

That looks good but the Athlon mainboard is too old to have PCIe.

I don't want to fiddle with it too much as the PC is underpowered and will be replaced at some point.

Then your options are very limited. There are USB 3 cards for PCI, but expensive and you only get about 1.3Gbps of bandwidth:

Theo

Not sure if Windows can compress data on external drives? That might reduce the throughput through the USB interface.

I've also used a NAS drive which is limited by Ethernet speeds where wired.

Have you tested the read/write speeds? What is too slow for you?

That's an example of a PCI card for (reduced-speed) USB3. You'd expect around 100MB/sec with that (limited by PCI bus and burst size setting).

If you were transferring from the hard drive next to the Athlon board, to the external USB3, the bus bandwidth would be split, half for Southbridge, half for USB3 card, so the transfer rate then drops to 50MB/sec.

Only if the CPU "makes up the data", like makes some files with random data inside, does the transfer rate climb to the max of 100MB/sec. Many other combinations split bandwidth on those old systems.

The reason I latched onto the NEC chip in this case, is it has a WinXP driver. Some of the chips with MCCI UASP-capable drivers, they're not for WinXP, and Win7 is probably more of a plan with those. An Asmedia for example, is more likely to be for Win7/Win8/Win10 than for WinXP. I have an Asmedia right now I can't use under WinXP, which is why I'm aware of the limitation. My current computer has a NEC card for USB3.

The Athlon really is, too old at the moment. The 30MB/sec you should be getting at the moment, is a "satisfactory" result for an old system like that, especially as the PCI bus bandwidth is shared all over the place.

They could have put more PCI busses in computers. I have a cheesy old Mac clone, which has two PCI buses of 3 slots each, and I kept that machine full (six cards) while using it. The extra bandwidth helps. AMD did make one chipset with two PCI buses on it, but one of the PCI buses had a bug and could only run at 25MB/sec :-) Talk about great place to have a hardware bug.

Paul

Exactly what I intend to do. A single dock wired to the Mboard via fly leads. I want about 4 separate systems each for various needs.

Internally I have 2 data-only discs of which one is SSD and the other conventional HD. The second which will mostly mirror the data disc content. I also have an external back up for both data discs. The back's are done as and when using Bat files with instructions to copy and paste only if certain file meta-data changes are detected. So, not time consuming.

Shouldn't be too hard to stick a couple of plugs into a drive, should it? But, yeah, a sturdy dock would be better, and tidier.

Ray.

The daft par is that if you open up the drive you will in fact find it has the normal port on it so you could remove it and shove it in the computer. I've never quite understood why such external socket extensions are not supplied on motherboard/cases, so that a much simpler external drive could be used without all the extra gubbins needed for usb3. Brian

good money after bad for an aging xp box?

ESATA is available on computers.

My most modern computer (four years old) has two ESATA connectors.

Making it work is an uphill battle. You have to want the ESATA to work pretty badly, to finish a project.

For example, I can't buy ESATA cables in town. I can only order them off the Internet.

I do regularly leave the door off the PC, and run SATA cables to 3.5" hard drive(s). At least I have an assortment of cables to make that happen.

Paul