Firewire Bottleneck

[Marble]

I recently connected a 7200rpm external hard drive to my Powerbook with a firewire cable. The internal ATA bus on the Powerbook (a Titanium) is 4200rpm, but I'm not sure what the data throughput is. My question is whether data access through the firewire connection will be faster than the internal Powerbook hard drive, which has noticeable lag while moving directory and application locations with journaling enabled?

 

[Toeknee]

Well the Titanium PBs use a UltraATA/66 bus for its internal HD. But the Firewire bus is separate from that bus FW runs at 400Mb/s (megabits not bytes) on the Ti. The RPMs of the external HD matter (among other things) when talking about data access. But you should notice good performance with using a FW HD while moving apps around and such. Hope this helps

 

[Marble]

Yep. I also do disk-access intensive audio work. My real question is whether the internal drive is going to be faster for constant access (I have over 25GB of audio plug-ins, software, and samples that take up a lot of this internal drive's space) for this particular purpose, because it will certainly be more convenient.

 

[6163621]

Have you had finder crash when copying yet? Seemingly a regular occurance to my patched Pyro drives using various HDDs (I have swapped cables, cases etc so it "should not" be one such drive.
Firewire under Panther seems broken generally compared to 10.2.8 and I am very close to downgrading.
My machine went to sleep last night and when I just entered the screen saver password today and opened up the firewire drive. Finder kept spinning the ball for ages... Reset... Began copying files from a firewire drive back to my system connected drives.... stalls mid transfer and just sits there with the time to copy increasing all the time.. Needed power cord plug pull...

All drives are fine. Have been DiskWarriored as relevant, checked with Techtools Pro and even (a few thanks to the data eating but, Disk Doctored).

More and more of my productive time is being lost due to 10.3.2. and Firewire issues plus that it is starting to affect my view of Apple and makes me wonder if I am wise pushing a PC replacement programme within my company. At least with Microsoft the basic stuff USUALLY works and I have never had basic stuff like drive connectivity fail . All the usual thingsl ike cache cleaning, disk repairs and repair permissions are used more times than a swear word in a sports bar to no avail. PMU resets the lot.

I even took the time to run the APPLE HARDWARE TEST at one stage fearing bad RAM. No bad marks reported.

 

[Marble]

Well, I actually haven't had any problems at all but I just got the thing today. I have several friends who have external firewire drives and none of them have ever had problems (all on OS 10.3.2) except one who had accidentally not pushed the pins all the way in on the IDE connector for the firewire enclosure around his HD. I was just wondering about disk speed.
Actually, now that I have more space on my hard drive, my computer in general seems smoother and less strained, like actual burden has been lifted off of it. This is technically incorrect, I know, but the placebo is marvelous. While before the extra drive I still had plenty of room for virtual memory, I wonder if there is any substantiation to a generally faster drive with less used capacity (disk defragmentation aside)?
Anyway, good luck with your problems as they sound nasty. What computer are you using? I've heard significant reports of problems with Apple's latest portable line and last generation iBook G3s, but I'm at a university so that's pretty much all that anyone has anyway.

 

[6163621]

Thanks. G4 1.25GHz x2 with 2Gb RAM. Latest everything patched etc. It is not a directly mirrorable fault to say each time I copy a file more than x size to this drive. But it seemed to be narrowed down to the Finder (generally seems not so good in .3), Firewire drives and the system's tolerance of them. Have wondered if journalling is an issue. Need to investigate.

It seems the trouble comes in waves. At least I don't have Nortons installed ö)

 

[7on]

Well I was having that same problem with a pyro. You know what the problem was? A small "power" connector inside had come halfway out. I had not even noticed it before. Pushed it in and everything was ok. It should be located near the rear on the right side (when viewed from the front of course). There should be 2 black connectors and check if they're unplugged.

 

[6163621]

70n.. thanks.. I was fully bunged up on all of the drive enclosures! Worth a check though.