Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Is Firewire 800 needed on a hard drive?

M

musukosan

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 6, 2008
312
75
Puyallup, WA
About to buy a new external. I don't own a Mac yet, but I will by year's end. Anyways, I would like to buy a HD with Firewire 800, but started wondering if the speeds of the hard drive can even match the speed of FW800. Is it worth the extra money?

Thanks.
 
Depends on what you want to do with it.

If you're only going to use it for backup storage, USB 2.0 is good enough.

If you want to use it for Time Machine backup or a Final Cut scratch disk, then you need at least FW800.
 
FW 400 is fine for Time Machine. I have a workgroup of 4 users backing up using time machine over the network to an external FW 400 drive on my Mac Pro desktop, and it works great.

Locally, I get 20 MBPS transfer rates from my Mac Pro to my FW 400 disks, which is fine for all but the most data intensive uses (my Mac Pro only gets 45 MBPS read/write to its internal SATA disks, anyway). Big advantage of FW 400 is you can daisy chain the disks together, so I have TBs of cheap backup storage attached to my machine...
 
musukosan said:
About to buy a new external. I don't own a Mac yet, but I will by year's end. Anyways, I would like to buy a HD with Firewire 800, but started wondering if the speeds of the hard drive can even match the speed of FW800. Is it worth the extra money?

Thanks.
Click to expand...
Yes it is worth the extra money-if you need the speed of course.

I always recommend getting an external HD with as many variety's of port on as possible, just so if one happens to break your not stuck.

This is a known decent drive with fw400 fw800 eSata and USB2 http://www.g-technology.com/products/g-driveq.cfm
May be that a different drive suits your uses, Raid etc ? .
The rest of their stuff is at this link http://www.g-technology.com/products/products.cfm?interest=all


All depends on the Mac your planing on getting really though ....if you get the Macbookpro it has a firewire800 port ( also has express card slot for eSata!)as do the MacMini's and the MacPro's off the top of my head I think the iMac has FW 400 ?
 
If you are going to get a Mac with FW800, then yes, go ahead and get an external HDD that can do that too.
However, as others have said, look at what you will be using it for. Not all applications necessitate a blazing-fast external drive, and USB 2.0 will suffice in many cases to keep your costs down.

And yes, the internal drive in those enclosures can sure handle that speed. Most newer externals use a SATA interface internally, meaning the internal drives are capable of 3Gb/s. FW800 can do 800Mb/s, meaning the bottleneck will be the FireWire, not the Drive.

marbles said:
All depends on the Mac your planing on getting really though ....if you get the Macbookpro it has a firewire800 port ( also has express card slot for eSata!)as do the MacMini's and the MacPro's off the top of my head I think the iMac has FW 400 ?
Click to expand...

The expresscard slot in some cases "in most if not all cases"(oops, bad wording there :eek:) will run that eSATA port at USB 2.0 speeds since that is how it tends to interface with the computer for those types of cheap cards.

The new iMacs have 1 FW 800. Older ones have a variety.
 
Any sort of "pro app" you'll want firewire 800, although on my imac i've used FW400 while doing Stand def. in final cut and it was fine.... Its nice if you have it but so is dual 30" inch ACD
 
marbles said:
Now that I didn't know ...you sure ?
Click to expand...

Yup. Expresscard specs

The host device supports both PCI Express and USB 2.0 connectivity through the ExpressCard slot, and each card uses whichever the designer feels most appropriate to the task
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, some of the cheap cards choose the USB 2.0 option since it is easier / cheaper, and they can advertise it as "eSATA port" :rolleyes:

I think this is a case where you get what you pay for. This practice is much more prevalent on memory card / CF readers, but I have heard it done for a number of eSATA cards, too...

[EDIT] reading my initial wording I think the words I used were a bit wrong there. Should have said some eSATA cards do that. I think the "most if not all" applies to the CF readers I mentioned... oops :eek:
 
If your going to be getting a Mac with a FW800 port you may as well get a FW800 hard drive because if you get a FW400 hard drive you'll have to buy converter cables and mess around with all that kind of stuff. FW400 to FW800 aren't directly compatile. You cant simply plug a FW400 device into a FW800 port.

Its not dificult to do, its just a hassle, more cables to buy, more cables to remember and loose and get tangled etc etc.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back