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FireWire 800 vs internal SATA speeds

maclover001

maclover001

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 25, 2008
895
0
Vancouver, Canada
Hey guys,

Using a PowerMac G5 as a web server, and I need more storage.

Is FW800 any slower than the Powermac G5's internal SATA connections?
Two bays is not enough storage for me.

Thanks
 
maclover001 said:
Hey guys,

Using a PowerMac G5 as a web server, and I need more storage.

Is FW800 any slower than the Powermac G5's internal SATA connections?
Two bays is not enough storage for me.

Thanks
Click to expand...

I believe the SATA will be faster than FW800, but for webserver functions you'll never notice. Your bottleneck will be the Internet connection speed.
 
Hard drives are much slower then SATA or even firewire 400. So you shouldn't notice a difference. How do you like shaw nitro? Is that the same thing as the "warp" one currently offered?
 
maclover001 said:
I'm on Shaw's "Nitro" internet plan. Speeds are plenty.
Click to expand...

They're still loads slower than FW800. Or FW400.


trainguy77 said:
Hard drives are much slower then [sic] [...] firewire 400.
Click to expand...


:confused:
Er... no.

I've got a pair of drives in my Mac Pro that will each hit 110MB/s. That's 880Mb/s. What do you suppose the 400 and 800 in the Firewire designations refer to (hint: it's the theoretical interface speed in Mb/s).
 
trainguy77 said:
How do you like shaw nitro? Is that the same thing as the "warp" one currently offered?
Click to expand...

They changed the name to "Warp" a month or so ago, but I'm pretty sure its the same plan. The price is a bit high though, I wouldn't bother with it unless you are running a high-traffic webserver.
 
maclover001 said:
Hey guys,

Using a PowerMac G5 as a web server, and I need more storage.

Is FW800 any slower than the Powermac G5's internal SATA connections?
Two bays is not enough storage for me.

Thanks
Click to expand...

Usually for a SUPER BUSY web server, the limitation is not in the bandwidth from hard drive to the controller, but in the hard drive itself. Its physical limitations (rotation speed and seek speed) are more likely to affect the efficiency.
 
Must be a rather damn big website if two whole internal drives aren't big enough. A rather fantastically stupendous website. How many websites have more than 2TB of content? Er.....

And even USB drive carriers would be more than fast enough for adding extra storage. As said above, the limit is at internal drive random access speeds, not sequental transfer or transfer bandwidth. Random access speeds are usually 1/10th or worse of sequential access. That's why servers fork out for small but fast 15k Cheetahs or Intel XM-25 Flash drives.
 
maclover001 said:
Hey guys,

Using a PowerMac G5 as a web server, and I need more storage.

Is FW800 any slower than the Powermac G5's internal SATA connections?
Two bays is not enough storage for me.

Thanks
Click to expand...

Does the Power Mac G5 have SATA I or II ports? It's 1.5gbps for SATA I and 3.0gbps for SATA II. But if you have either or, it's not going to be much faster than Firewire 800, due to the physical limitations of the hard drive. The only way SATA would prove to be faster is if the hard drives were in a RAID array. But from what I'm hearing, you don't have them in a RAID array.

I think if you really wanted to go for speed, is get a PCI-X or PCI Express SATA card (depending on which Power Mac G5 that you have). Otherwise, Firewire 800 is plenty speedy.
 
For best performance, set up RAID for fastest accessing times (and perhaps redundancy).

SATA is better. There are kits that add more internal drive spaces to PowerMac G5.
 
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