SATA vs Firewire 800

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SATA vs Firewire 800

Anyone done real world apples to apples testing to compare internal SATA drives with external Firewire 800 drives in Raid 0 config? I just did some very rudimentary media copying tasks from an internal 7200rpm SATA to an external 7200rpm Firwire 800 Raid 0 striped LaCie Big Disc (about 76 gig of data). Copying from the internal SATA to the External Firewire took about 1 hour. Copying the same data back to the SATA (after re-formatting it) took about 40 minutes. Does this sound right to everyone?

G5 Quad Core, Mac OS X (10.4.6), 8 Gig RAM, Kona 3 HD, Fibre, XServe Raid

Posted on Sep 10, 2006 2:19 PM

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Answer 1

Sep 10, 2006 3:11 PM in response to Dan Brazda

Is the RAID formatted Mac OS Extended? http://www.barefeats.com tests all this sort of thing and posts it... might check that out. Also might check out a disk utiltiy that measures speed. You can find one here: http://www.aja.com/html/supportkona3swd.html Download the Kona System test utiltiy... post back with speed results. Seems to me a FW 800 raid should be a little faster but not twice as fast...

Jerry

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Answer 2

Sep 10, 2006 5:53 PM in response to Jerry Hofmann

I tell you Dan, I ran both a RAID 0 striped pair of FW 800's (250 gig ea) and a RAID 0 striped pair of SATA's (250 gig ea).

(Also use Black Magic Decklink Extreme) Which came with a nifty drive speed test utility. With the SATA's am getting
Disc Read Data Rate of 90.8 MB/s & Disc Write Data Rate of 91.6 MB/s
Good for 67 fps read & 68 fps write for 10 bit NTSC 4:4:4

The FW800 RAID was doing
Disc Read Data Rate of 80 MB/s & Disc Write Data Rate of 58.2 MB/s

While the SATA's sometime fail to mount till I've restareted a couple times, they've generally been o.k. They're LaCie d2' s(which I'll never buy again) w/the LaCie SATA PCI card.

The FW800's (also LaCie d2's) w/a LaCie FW 800 PCI card were nothing but problems from day one. My guess is, in trying to get the real benifits of a striped pair raid (as I under stand it) they have to run into seperate busses.

I think my problem is, the speed of the LaCie FW 800 and the G5's internal FW800 bus are different, causing my problmes.

Just today I split 'em apart, and removed the FW800 PCI card and am gonna try and get my old Adaptek 29160 SCSI card to work. Bet it won't. But tired of the LaCie head aches and wasted time.

Good luck.

p2

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