firewire 800 transfer rate

Question

firewire 800 transfer rate

i was transferring stuff to my firewire800 ext. hard drive and noticed that 2 gigs of data took about 3 minutes to transfer.
i was under the impression that the 800 was supposed to be twice as fast as the 400.
but this is the same time it takes to transfer approximately the same amount of data to my firewire400 ext hard drive.
what should i be expecting?

MacBookPro 2.2 GHz 2GB ram, Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Apr 10, 2008 1:44 PM

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Answer 1

akdj

Level 1

5 points

Apr 10, 2008 3:11 PM in response to jeremy douglass

Jeremy...the bottleneck is in your hardrive...and the speed it writes the transfer. Both FW 4 and 800 are quicker than the writing speed of your HD's.

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Answer 2

Apr 11, 2008 12:08 PM in response to akdj

I just got an OWC external FW 400/800 and USB enclosure with a SATA 320 gig drive. I also have an older OWC external FW 400 IDE enclosure. On the new MBP, and the new drive enclosure with the SATA drive, FW800 was about 20% faster than FW400 and USB was a little better than 50% slower than FW800. What really suprised me was when I measured the speed of my older FW400 enclosure with the IDE drive it was actually about 5% slower than the USB on the newer enclosure.

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Answer 3

Apr 11, 2008 1:20 PM in response to jeremy douglass

ya there are so many factors in what will slow or speed up transfer rates. FW 800 is 100 MBps and FW400 is 50 MBps. but just because you have a straight away that is 200 mphs doesnt mean your car can go that fast (best analogy i can think off of the top of my head)

the drive, the bridge/internal electronics, the computers fw system, the processor and the other drive and its other electronics can all slow it down.

-matt

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