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I purchased this drive to go into a Thermaltake BlacX docking enclosure to have as a backup drive on an external eSATA connection. I also had to buy the external port and attached cable to connect the Mother Board socket to the computer back plate. My mother Board has 4 SATA sockets. Worth a check before you try this solution for a backup drive if you already have 2 internal hard drives. So far the drive and enclosure works fine.
At first when coping from the (int)C:\ drive to the new external drive, after creating two 495 Gig partitions and formatting them (which took about 4 hours to run BTW) the drive was extraordinarily slow. It took about 220 minutes to copy a 12 Gig folder. However form the (int)D:\ drive, the same folder took only 6 minutes. About the same when coping between the two internal drives.
I had to take a look at the properties of the controllers and fix the speed settings for the PCI ATT/ATAPI Controllers. My PC shows 3 of these and the first Primary controller was set to PIO transfer rate. This is the slowest rate possible and is normally auto set when the Controller received Busy/Timeouts back from the channel. My assumption is that happened when I first hung the new drive on the system and it was not prepped/formatted.
The fix is easy, just right click on "My Computer", select "Manage", then "Device Manager", and open up the "IDE ATT/ATAPI Controllers", There were 3 listed on my Win-XP PC. Two Primary and a Secondary. Open up each controller and select the top tab "Advanced Settings". Check to see what the "Current Transfer Mode" window is set at. It should say "DMA if available" and "Ultra DMA Mode 5" or 2.
If it says "PIO Only" mode, then the transfer rate has been set to the slowest possible speed.
To solve this, Right click on the errant Controller and select "Uninstall". You will then be prompted to Reboot. The controller will be reset to the maximum speed again and following another prompted Reboot. After the controller is found and reinstalled, check that it says "DMA if available" and "Ultra DMA Mode 5" or 2.
The speeds will then be up to snuff :)
This is an excellent solution for keeping backups of your important data on another device with good speed and integrity.
I thoroughly recommend it.
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