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norliss

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 7, 2009
17
0
Hi there: I've loosely got 2 questions to the wise here...

I recently acquired a new MacBook Pro 17" and have extended my collection of external drives. I have:

- 300GB Lacie (connected via FW800) after years of service, now semi-retired used solely as a clone of the system drive

- 1TB Seagate Freeagent (via FW800) currently used as 2/3 Timemachine and 1/3 general non-important storage

- 2TB WD MyBook Studio II (via FW800) to be used as a FCP scratch disc.

I've only had the Seagate for a day and it's behaving ok but seems quite warm to the touch, whilst the WD (arrived today) seems to run much cooler.

I have thought of changing things so that:

- 1TB Seagate becomes the scratch drive

- 2TB WD becomes 3 partitions: (i) small amount of storage (ii) timemachine backup and (iii) a scratch disc backup

My logic being that (a) the Seagate will be in use less and (b) that I will be able to back-up capture/scratch stuff. There are two possible downsides to this:

- That I will effectively half my capacity for scratch, although at 2TB I might have over-estimated my need in any case.

- I give up my potential for eSata for the scratch disc.

So as well as general advice about my set-up (or proposed set-up) I'm asking whether eSata would be sufficiently faster to justify purchase of an Express/34 card and restricting myself to only using the WD for scratch.

Now give yourself a medal for reading through all this! :)
 
Express card eSATA II speed

I do pro video all the time and I have a MacALLY 1 TB custom drive w/ eSATA to eSATA express-card. The speed is 2.5 GT/s - which is many times faster than Firewire 800. I live off eSATA PCIe when transferring very large and bandwidth hungry files. 2 drives can be run at the same time using a PCIe card or a total of 5 GT/s.

Firewire 800 is only 800 Mbits/s or 100 MBytes/s - eSATA PCIe is closer to 300 MBytes/s on each channel!
 
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