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buzzfgo

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 9, 2004
97
0
Up State NY
What would be faster? A 160gig 7200rpm 8meg buffer IDE or firewire. My computer is a 733 quicksilver. I am booting from the firewire right now. Just want to see if it would be faster to put the 160gig inside or leave it on the firewire.
 

robbieduncan

Moderator emeritus
Jul 24, 2002
25,611
893
Harrogate
Any differences are going to be ultra-minimal. Neither bus should be constraining the drives performance so you not really going to gain anyhting by switching from one to the other.
 

CanadaRAM

macrumors G5
Hard Drive ?

A Firewire drive is nothing but an IDE drive, with a bridge board to translate to Firewire, and a case and cable. Therefore, connecting a given drive by Firewire has to be slower than that same drive connected to an IDE bus directly, due to the overhead of the bus and the bridge card conversion. In my experience, Firewire 400 is considerably slower in real-world transfers than direct IDE, and for large data transfers, Firewire is -way- flakier.

The plusses for Firewire are portability and handling drives larger than 120 Gb.

If you have the choice to mount the drive internally, and speed is the primary consideration, go internal.

Note that 2001 and older G4 machines and all G3s may have a problem supporting 160 Gb and larger drives internally, requiring the use of a third party driver or installing a PCI-ATA interface card. http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/IDE/big_ide_drive_support.html
 
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