Fixed eSATA: Timeout waiting for drive to become ready

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Tig77

SpinRite Customer
Dec 29, 2020
11
1
48
Ontario, Canada
Hello,

I am using an HP Pavilion laptop from 2008 and I have a 1TB external HD in an HD enclosure connected via an eSATA cable which plugs into a combo USB/eSATA port.

I ran ReadSpeed for Windows, it created the bootable USB for ReadSpeed v1.0 and booted up okay. The eSATA drive was powered on, already spun up and plugged into the USB/eSATA port prior to booting the ReadSpeed USB drive.

When ReadSpeed is initializing, there is a white bar at the top, then I can hear my eSATA drive make the usual sounds and click as though it's just spinning up again, then I get this timeout error message in my ReadSpeed log:

Code:
  +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
  | ReadSpeed: Hyper-accurate mass storage read-performance benchmark. rel 1 |
  |  Benchmarked values are in megabytes read per second at five locations.  |
  +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Timeout waiting for drive to become ready:  0:31:2  Stat:00000080           
Driv Size  Drive Identity     Location:    0      25%     50%     75%     100
---- ----- ---------------------------- ------- ------- ------- ------- -------
81  320GB FUJITSU MHZ2320BH G2           56.9    53.0    47.9    40.1    28.2
82    0BY                           

                  Benchmarked: Tuesday, 2020-12-29 at 05:10
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
   See the ReadSpeed forums at forums.grc.com for help and community support.

However, if I exit ReadSpeed, unplug my eSATA drive, then run ReadSpeed again and at the same time plug my eSATA drive in as ReadSpeed is initializing, it recognizes the drive no problem and can benchmark it:

Code:
  +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
  | ReadSpeed: Hyper-accurate mass storage read-performance benchmark. rel 1 |
  |  Benchmarked values are in megabytes read per second at five locations.  |
  +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Driv Size  Drive Identity     Location:    0      25%     50%     75%     100
---- ----- ---------------------------- ------- ------- ------- ------- -------
81  320GB FUJITSU MHZ2320BH G2           56.9    53.0    47.9    40.1    28.2
82  1.0TB ST31000340AS                  107.1   101.2    89.2    70.6    50.4

                  Benchmarked: Tuesday, 2020-12-29 at 04:38
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
   See the ReadSpeed forums at forums.grc.com for help and community support.

I just thought I would bring this to your attention. Otherwise, ReadSpeed seems to give fairly consistent speed benchmark scores for these two drives over the few times I tested it.

Also, I was wondering, can I also benchmark my external hard drives connected via USB only?

Thanks!

Best regards,
Shawn
 
Last edited:
Thanks for the report, Shawn. That's exactly the sort of problem I would love to track down. What's weird is that the status shown there "00000080" is completely ready. And from your description is sounds as though there's some sort of eSata power control and cycling going on. I think that I have a couple of laptop tops around with eSata ports that I never directly tested. I'll do that to see whether I'm able to recreate the problem you found — and nice workaround, by the way!

Oh... and “fairly consistent results?” :) On the two reports your posted, that 320GB Fujitsu benchmarked at precisely the same speed to all digits shown, at each of the five locations tested! Yeah. Fairly consistent! :)
 
Hi Steve. Yes, I think my drive was power cycling as you said during ReadSpeed's initialization. I hope you're able to recreate the issue. I'd be happy to do further testing if necessary, just let me know.

Heh, yes, I meant to say that ReadSpeed gives very consistent results. I only noticed a 0.1 difference during a couple of tests in the readings which I would imagine would be totally normal and to be expected. :)

I guess to get the "average" speed of the drive, one would tally the five speeds benchmarked by ReadSpeed and divide by five?

Happy New Year!

Shawn
 
I'd be happy to do further testing if necessary, just let me know.
I'll probably take you up on that, Shawn. I added the power management due to its being needed for Macs. But the latest Mac upgrades appear to have deliberately terminated their ability to boot DOS. So it's unclear whether that should remain in the code. If I were to remove it (we were working fine without it for quite a while) I'd make it a command-line option. My hunch is that then all would be well on your machine. Thanks for your follow-up... I'll be in touch!
 
UPDATE: ISSUE FIXED

@Steve was able to fix this issue by increasing how long ReadSpeed waits when it starts, for the eSATA connected drive to be ready from it's power cycling, from a 2 second wait to 10 seconds. Works like a dream now! No more timeout errors. Thanks Steve!
 
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