Firewire 800 data transfer speeds?

Transferring about 220 gigs from a Lacie Rugged 500 (Firewire 800) to a Seagate 1 Terrabyte drive (Firewire 800) and the transfer seems to be taking longer than expected (about 8 hours)

is this an accurate amount of time to move this amount of footage? I am running an 2ghz Duo MacBook Pro. The drives are daisy changed through several other drives (2 G-Raids) and an older La Cie. Everything is connected via Firewire 800...

Couldn't find anything online about a time / per gigabyte ratio for the Firewire 800....

Any thoughts?

thanks!

Firewire 800 has a peak transfer rate of about 780Mb/s. Note that the "b" is a lowercase, meaning bits per second. There are 8 bits in a byte. So, assuming that peak transfer rates can be maintained, that's 780Mb/s divided by 8 = 97MB/s. 60 seconds * 97 would be 5820MB per hour. 5820MB * 60 would be 349,200MB. There's 1024MB in a Gigabyte, so that would be 341GB/hour.

EDIT: OK, I keep screwing up my math. I think I'm right now. That does seem pretty slow.

OK, I've been thinking a lot about this thread. My bet is that when you daisy-chain the drives, the bandwidth is split, resulting in slower transfer rates the further you get down the chain. I might be wrong on that, but it's my only guess.

Let me try starting the transfer over and plugging the drives directly into one another rather than having 3 drives in between them...

taynos said:

Let me try starting the transfer over and plugging the drives directly into one another rather than having 3 drives in between them...

Click to expand...

I'd try it that way and also with the other drives completely disconnected and see what you get. Good luck.

And sorry for messing up my math - I must have edited that post 5 times... I feel like a dunce

Connected the two drives directly and removed any drives not being used and am getting WAY faster transfer speeds. Not the 341 GB you speak of. But now I'm at about 100gb an hour.

The LaCie Rugged is a 5400 RPM drive so I am sure that is slowing things down a bit.

The theory that daisy chaining the drives splits the bandwith amongst the drives seems accurate. Thanks for your help cwa!