Ext. sata hdd only transfers at about 25 MB/sec

[khaos]

I had a few sata ext hdd's that used usb or esata to connect to the computer. I wanted faster transfer rates than USB and since I dont have that many or even one esata port on my laptop I bought a 5-bay enclosure and an express 34 card. Both support esata Raid 5.
I get all my hdd's fine but they only transfer at an avg of 25MB/sec...Ive seen it around 30 sometimes and then at 12 sometimes....I see no difference than if I were using USB.

My laptop is pretty decent:
Windows Vista Ultimate
AMD Turion 64X2 2.2 GHz
3022 RAM DDR2

HDD's:
http://i75.photobucket.com/albums/i295/KhAos64/HDD.jpg

Thats just one of my drives but the others' specs look very similar.

If anyone has any suggestions or know what would be causing this. Please let me know and thanks in advance.

[robin9000]

Try going with the new generation of IEEE (1394) port connection. Get your self an external on and plug your hard drive into that and connect it up with a firewire cable for it and you should get double the speed out of it. The old USB was only good for 400mb/s and the new firewire 800mb/s. I may be a bit out dated though so you might want to double check those specs but I am pretty sure that is the correct information.

[khaos]

Thanks for the reply, but I thought sata was faster than firewire. And I have not seen too many or if any firewire 5-bay enclosures at least support raid 5. What I was saying about with the usb was that the hdd's were originally in external enclosures that supported usb or firewire connections to my laptop. Now Im using a 5-bay esata enclosure.

-edit- Ive been looking around on the net and from what I understand is that the UDMA might have something to do with it...but I dont know.???