FW800 vs internal HD. Which is faster?

Internal is faster and more reliable. Firewire 800 though will enable you to connect a larger drive meaning you'll be able to store more data at once.

I aam not sure I understand your question, but I'm assuming you mean will your MBP start up and run faster from a FW800 drive. It probably would if the FW drive is at least 7200 rpm and the internal is a 5400 rpm drive. If you actually were asking about access time, that would also be dependant on the drive mechanism. With equal speed drives, it is likely that the external drive would be a little faster assuming it is a 3.5" drive.

I use external 10,000 rpm SATA2 drives which are much higher in overall performance than any notebook drives. I use the Firmtek hardware that is reviewed here: <http://www.barefeats.com/hard71.html>. I notice generally better performance in work that uses the HDs heavily, but not as much as the tests indicate. There are many variables involved that tend to shade the differences. Be sure you check the ExpressCard/34 category here before you buy a FW800 adapter. Some of them are quite troublesome.

Webb

Internal is faster and more reliable. Firewire 800
though will enable you to connect a larger drive
meaning you'll be able to store more data at once.

That is not true at all. Laptop drives are known for being slow. And the speed depends on the rpms of the hard drive itself; not firewire's speed. You can put a 10,000rpm drive or a 7200rpm drive in a FW800 enclosure. So it depends on the drive.

And FWIW: notebook drives that are 7200rpm DO spin at that rate, but do NOT have the same transfer specs as a 7200rpm desktop drive.

Internal Hard Drives in laptops are usally 5400rpm, if you get an external Hard Drive that is 7200rpm, it means that the external drive will be much faster.
In reality it doesn't matter if a Hard Drive is internal or external, what matters is the speed it self.

I'm not sure i get all this... i thought firewire was capped at a certain rate regardless of the harddrive connected, Wouldn't any 3.5Sata drive simply be restricted by FW800

Can someone explain this in a little more detail?


thanks

S

It is true. The hard drive speed of Firewire 800 is no faster than a 5400 RPM drive 2.5" drive:

http://www.bixnet.com/16insanohadr.html

shows the speed of a 5400 RPM notebook drive to be 150 megabytes per second which is 1200 megabits per second, or the faster than the standard speed of Firewire 800. And to top it off, the SATA bus of the MacBook Pro is rated at 1.5 Gbps:

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/HardwareDrivers/Conceptual/17inMacBookP ro_0604/Articles/17inMacBookProArch.html

So no matter how fast your Firewire 800 drive is internally, it will still be stuck with half the bottleneck of the Firewire 800 port as the internal SATA bus which is no bottleneck whatsoever.

Edit: I found a typical 2.5" 160 GB 5400 RPM drive that is SATA which is faster than the original drive I posted.

Simon,
It would. Note though the Barefeats links is SATA, not Firewire 800. And SATA is much faster in specs than Firewire 800. So maybe what you are looking for is a good external drive case which is bootable, supports SATA2 instead of Firewire 800 and then the Express/34 SATA card in Barefeats for optimal performance of an external drive. I've never tried such a drive, nor can attest to its reliability. I would though say, that in prior experience with Firewire 800 and 400 drives, I couldn't maintain a reliable connection for extended file transfer copies, and they just simply quit on me. Maybe SATA finally bridges the gap between reliable copying within an external and that of an internal.

Whatever you do, I recommend backing up your data as my FAQ states:

http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html

" I couldn't maintain a reliable connection for extended file transfer copies, and they just simply quit on me. Maybe SATA finally bridges the gap between reliable copying within an external and that of an internal."

Thanks for the clarification. I should have said that this is exactly why we have turned to the more expensive SATA solutioin. We often transfer large files, and also found that firewire would sometimes fail. So far, SATA hardware has been totally reliable, but the fragile looking ExpressCard 34 might be the weak link. Too bad there wasn't room for the 54.

Webb

Great, than you for the clarification, a brody.

I have been looking at sata1/2 express cards along with a Sata external box with hot swappable 3.5 drivebays.

The SATA2 external solution seems like the way to go for pure speed. I'm a Photographer with thousands of files that simply won't fit on the MBP but still need the speed via an external solution. I will be using either Aperture or lightroom for this so i need the fastest possible solution in a mobile setup.

Kappy helped me in another post and it seems the internal workings of the MBP will support the speeds of SATA2 as long as the Expresscard 34 is SATA2 compatible.

Great thanks guys n girls