Moving a ton of data (>500GB)

[Rafalski24]

So I have a uMBP 5,4 and a bunch of externals. I am going to be moving over 500 gigs of data from one external to another. They both have about the same speed read/write, but with the uMBP I only have one FW800 port. So my question is how should I connect these drives (the way I understand it you only get one 800 Mbps link to the computer and connecting multiple drives only allows them to share this through-put) Will it be fast to connect one via USB and one via FW800 or just daisy chain them using FW800?
thanks

 

[moral-hazard]

So I have a uMBP 5,4 and a bunch of externals. I am going to be moving over 500 gigs of data from one external to another. They both have about the same speed read/write, but with the uMBP I only have one FW800 port. So my question is how should I connect these drives (the way I understand it you only get one 800 Mbps link to the computer and connecting multiple drives only allows them to share this through-put) Will it be fast to connect one via USB and one via FW800 or just daisy chain them using FW800?
thanks

Not sure if someone will know this offhand. USB will limit you to about 30mb/s or so. I would try transferring one file (say, something about a gigabyte in size) both ways and see which one works faster. I know that putting multiple USB devices on a hub would be terribly slow, but I am not sure how fast daisy chaining on FW works in practice.

 

[Makosuke]

It's actually possible, according to the spec, for one Firewire device to transfer data directly to another. Pretty sure that's not actually going to happen in a file copy situation like this, though.

Based on my admittedly limited experience, I'm going to guess you'll get slightly better real-world throughput with both devices on FW800 than FW800 for one and USB2 for the other. You could of course test, as suggested, but I'm skeptical there's going to be a big difference either way.

If you already have the cables for a FW800 chain, I'd personally just do that, mainly on account of (admittedly rare) situations where I've had a USB drive flake out on me during a large transfer. Might've just been bad cables (or a bad drive), of course.

 

[Rafalski24]

Thats about as far as I got too. Anyone else have any other insights?