USB or Firewire 800 Extrenal drive

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I have a unibody MBP with the Expresscard 34 slot. I am currently running a LaCie Quadra drive via an eSata card.

The problem is using the eSata card the speed of back up has dropped dramatically, as I gather the efi update earlier this year caused problems with cards using the Silicone Image chip. ( Yes mine uses that chip. )

It's getting to the point when I need to add an additional drive. The question is do I go for another Quadra or similar drive, and hope that Snow Leopard will fix the problem or opt for a USB or Firewire 800 drive.

Doing some speed tests on a largish batch of files I found that the eSata transfer took 2.05 mins. The Firewire 800 took 2.10 minutes and the USB took 2.2 minutes. What surprised me was the relative slowness of the Firewire 800 transfer. Could this be down to the LaCie Quadra interface eSata, Firewire 800, Firewire 400, and USB.

Suggestions and comments greatly apreciated
 

dtravis7


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There is something wrong somewhere if USB 2.0 beats out FW 800.

I hope Apple fixes this. ESata is very fast normally.
 

cwa107


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ESATA is only superficially different from SATA. The bus itself is the same, converted to work externally. If you're seeing transfer rates that aren't comparable to the internal drive, then either the controller, driver or drive itself is at fault.

USB2 can transfer data at a peak rate of 480Mb/s, compared to FW800's peak rate of 800Mb/s. The difference is that FW can do sustained transfers at that speed, being that it has its own I/O controller and doesn't rely on system resources. In the real world, even FW400 typically beats out USB2 in tests, particularly when we're talking about large files. Small files are able to be transferred in short bursts, which may favor USB2 in comparison to FW400.

I can't account for the discrepancies you're seeing. But do keep in mind that the limiting factor may not be the bus. Many times, mechanical hard drives can't even saturate a FW400 bus, let alone FW800. Are we talking about 7200RPM drives with 16MB cache? Also, if the drive is mirrored (RAID1), there may be some degradation there as well. Of course, RAID0/5 configurations should be faster than a single drive.
 
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I suspect you're right about the saturation effect. The test was done with about 3.2Gb of data comprising of 30Mb files. This could account for the apparent poor showing of the FW800.

I suspect I'm expecting the same response from a laptop with an external drive as I would from my desktop. That may not be viable.

Considering I've been living with a slow eSATA transfer rate for some 6 months now maybe the FW800 or USB option may not be so bad after all

Thanks for the replies
 

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