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Apple Computing Products:
macOS - Notebook Hardware
USB or Firewire 800 Extrenal drive
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<blockquote data-quote="cwa107" data-source="post: 882939" data-attributes="member: 24098"><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>I can't account for the discrepancies you're seeing. But do keep in mind that the limiting factor <em>may not be the bus</em>. 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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="cwa107, post: 882939, member: 24098"] 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 [I]may not be the bus[/I]. 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. [/QUOTE]
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Apple Computing Products:
macOS - Notebook Hardware
USB or Firewire 800 Extrenal drive
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