Hi all, I have a question. I have a number of hard drives in external enclosures connected through my Firewire 400 port and daisy-chained together. It works nicely and I've been happy with the speed. Recently I added two hard drives in two separate enclosures to the daisy chain, and put them into a RAID 1 configuration (mirrored array). The speed of the RAID is fine when reading and writing, with one exception: when I'm copying files between a Firewire drive and the RAID.
This makes sense considering that previously, any copy activity between Firewire drives meant that the Firewire 400 bandwidth was being split between two drives. With the RAID 1, it's now being split between three.
All of my enclosures' Firewire ports are Firewire 400. However, I was wondering... if I buy a Firewire 400 to 800 cable and connect the RAID to my Firewire 800 port (simply to get it onto a different port), will the speed performance improve? I am aware that the transfer speeds would be going at Firewire 400 speeds, but I'm just curious if this would cause the Firewire bandwidth bottleneck to go back to a two-way split, rather than the current three-way split. In other words, is the Firewire 400 port's bandwidth separate from the Firewire 800 port, or are they shared?
I'm using a Macbook Pro 4,1 (early 2008 model). I've done some searching, but I can't find anything definite on this. I found one thread stating that the bus between the Firewire 400 and 800 ports was shared on Macbook Pros, which would mean that there's no real difference between daisy-chaining and putting the devices on separate ports for Firewire-to-Firewire transfers, but they didn't provide evidence or explain how they knew that.
Thanks in advance!
This makes sense considering that previously, any copy activity between Firewire drives meant that the Firewire 400 bandwidth was being split between two drives. With the RAID 1, it's now being split between three.
All of my enclosures' Firewire ports are Firewire 400. However, I was wondering... if I buy a Firewire 400 to 800 cable and connect the RAID to my Firewire 800 port (simply to get it onto a different port), will the speed performance improve? I am aware that the transfer speeds would be going at Firewire 400 speeds, but I'm just curious if this would cause the Firewire bandwidth bottleneck to go back to a two-way split, rather than the current three-way split. In other words, is the Firewire 400 port's bandwidth separate from the Firewire 800 port, or are they shared?
I'm using a Macbook Pro 4,1 (early 2008 model). I've done some searching, but I can't find anything definite on this. I found one thread stating that the bus between the Firewire 400 and 800 ports was shared on Macbook Pros, which would mean that there's no real difference between daisy-chaining and putting the devices on separate ports for Firewire-to-Firewire transfers, but they didn't provide evidence or explain how they knew that.
Thanks in advance!