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Fw800 or esata? Potential Remorse?

C

Cloud9

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 10, 2005
336
17
between flesh and thought
I just got a My Book Premium Edition II, Paid $250.00

1 tb (2 500gb drives)
usb 2.0
firewire 400
firewire 800

I currently use a MBP, c2d, 2.4ghz, 4gm ram.

I want to put my entire Lightroom Library on this drive to get faster performance then my internal drives. I learned after I got home that esata in RAID0 would be faster then firewire 800 in RAID0.

I do not do video work!

My photo library has more then 30,000 photos in it.

Will I see a performance gain with esata over firewire800 in my situation if I am running RAID0?

Would the performance gain be worth the extra money and hassle of returning this thing and getting and esata card etc?

Thanks
 
I'd go with the FW800 as well. You have the native port, so you won't need to spend the extra money to purchase the expresscard eSATA port. Granted the eSATA is faster, it's not a necessary speed bump for your uses, and it's performance is dependent on the card you choose.

If you were a video editor, I'd recommend the eSATA setup with a G-tech drive for multiple video streaming capabilities. But that would be overkill, as you already have a sufficient drive for your uses that has gotten good reviews. So rest assured, you're good to go. :)
 
DON'T USE RAID 0. It doubles your chance for drive failure and losing all your photos.
 
the esata with express card (rosewill express card is what I have) gets around 35mbps what does firewire 800 usually get?


I also second no raid 0. I have a heck of a time with it and time machine. The computer would stop reading the drive so I stopped using raid 0.

EDIT: Tomorrow my firewire drive should be here so I can post a speed comparison between eSata through the express card and firewire 800.
 
Not sure if anyone still reads this but an eSata enclosure with an external card is faster then firewire 800. I just got my firewire 800 enclosure today and I was kind of dissapointed in the results.

I figured that there would be a bottleneck using the express card through eSata (and there is, but its still faster then firewire 800).

I can't figure out how to see the actual transfer speed on a mac but I transferred 1.5 gigs several times from the laptop harddrive to the externals and results were very consistant.

First setup: 7200RPM Samsung drive in an Azio eSata enclosure with a Rosewill eSata express card.

Write time for 1.5 GB: 35 seconds.

Second setup: 7200RPM Samsung drive in an Icy Dock firewire 800 enclosure.

Write time for 1.5 GB: 1 minute.


Not the most scientific test and the results are an average of 5 times but they would only vary by a split second each time I transferred. Someone elses results may vary. Kind of dissapointing since i just spent $100 on the firewire 800 enclosure : /

Oh ya, hardware I tested it on is in my sig.
 
I agree. For photos you wont really see a difference my lightroom library puts yours to shame in terms of size and I use it on the firewire and put games on eSata. I had my lightroom library on eSata originally (until I got my firewire drive) and I see pretty much no difference in speed.
 
chrono1081 said:
Not sure if anyone still reads this but an eSata enclosure with an external card is faster then firewire 800. I just got my firewire 800 enclosure today and I was kind of dissapointed in the results.

I figured that there would be a bottleneck using the express card through eSata (and there is, but its still faster then firewire 800).

I can't figure out how to see the actual transfer speed on a mac but I transferred 1.5 gigs several times from the laptop harddrive to the externals and results were very consistant.

First setup: 7200RPM Samsung drive in an Azio eSata enclosure with a Rosewill eSata express card.

Write time for 1.5 GB: 35 seconds.

Second setup: 7200RPM Samsung drive in an Icy Dock firewire 800 enclosure.

Write time for 1.5 GB: 1 minute.


Not the most scientific test and the results are an average of 5 times but they would only vary by a split second each time I transferred. Someone elses results may vary. Kind of dissapointing since i just spent $100 on the firewire 800 enclosure : /

Oh ya, hardware I tested it on is in my sig.
Click to expand...

Just to chime in, I copied 1.5GB of photos from my Mac Pro to a OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro connected via FW800
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/1394/USB/EliteAL/800+USB2/

It copied the 1.5GB of photos in 33 seconds.

-Kevin
 
Interesting...wonder where my bottleneck is with firewire? I would really love to get the same speed with both of them because I would switch to firewire in a heartbeat.
 
chrono1081 said:
Interesting...wonder where my bottleneck is with firewire? I would really love to get the same speed with both of them because I would switch to firewire in a heartbeat.
Click to expand...

Not sure. I only have a MacBook here (FW400) so I can't test it.

I did notice that copying that same data between internal hard drives in my Mac Pro was the same 33 seconds as well.

-Kevin
 
I have an eSATA/FW800 enclosure (SS-25KB2e) I purchased from coolgear.com. It is paired with a Rosewill RC-605 eSATA II ExpressCard in Mac OS X 10.5.4 on a MacBook Pro using their latest driver (Sil332_1.1.9) and Hitachi 2.5" SATA 7200RPM 100GB drive. Here are my XBench benchmarks:

Results 15.77
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.4 (9E17)
Physical RAM 3072 MB
Model MacBookPro2,2
Drive Type HTS72108 0G9SA00
Disk Test 15.77

Sequential 19.51
Uncached Write 9.78 6.00 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 26.23 14.84 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 20.58 6.02 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 62.15 31.24 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 13.23
Uncached Write 3.97 0.42 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 43.87 14.04 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 63.78 0.45 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 82.78 15.36 MB/sec [256K blocks]

These are way below what I should be getting for eSATA performance. Are there any issues with the Rosewill and this enclosure? When connected using Firewire 800, I get better (but not stellar) throughput:

Sequential 63.99
Uncached Write 72.08 44.26 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 63.90 36.15 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 46.99 13.75 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 85.41 42.93 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 26.63
Uncached Write 9.23 0.98 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 63.12 20.21 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 67.81 0.48 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 88.74 16.47 MB/sec [256K blocks]
 
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