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I had ordered an Iomega Ego 2TB mac edition with firewire, but the shop couldn't supply it because it wasn't in stock anymore. Now I am still looking for a good external FW800 drive, and maybe I'll also buy the Seagate Firewire adapter. Can you just mount a 3,5" HD on it or do I really have to buy a Seagate Goflex?

You can't supply enough power for a 3.5" drive through a GoFlex adaptor alone, only 2,5" or smaller drives can.
 
Thanks! Then I'll probably buy a GoFlex and the adapter, so I can also use the adapter for my SSD. How long is the FW cable provided with the adapter?
 
Being that said, do you think external SSD even using USB 2.0 still better than using internal HDD? .. still, I´m talking about latency and access time, rather than transfer rate.

Would it still be faster to boot than internal HDD if we use SSD with USB 2 interface?

I think USB 2.0 might be too slow. It's okay if you plan on using the SSD for something else (e.g. waiting for TB enclosure) in the future but otherwise it seems like a very expensive solution with very limited bandwidth.
 
The imac boots up in 31 seconds, it takes 15seconds for the Apple logo to appare (this should be the same with normal HD) and another 16 seconds to boot into osx. Windows 7 in VMware takes 30 seconds to bootup. Overall i find SSD in FireWire mode does improve boot up time and overall speed of the system. The overall speed is mostly on par with my 2010 MacBook air.

If you already have an old SSD in hand then connect it to the iMac using firewire is a cheap way to boost system speed. As the Radom read/write and access speed are an improvement. The sequential speed drop doesn't really matter as most us use ssd as boot disk not storage for movies and large files.

I think I'll takeout the 1tb hd and swap it with the ssd, and run the hd in FireWire mode. This seems to be the easiest solution since we don't know if we can use thurderbolt drive as boot disk or the cost of such device.

P.S. Running ssd in usb2 will be too slow, I got less than half the firewire spped on the same tests in windows.
 
Here is the XBench scores. The left image shows SSD scores and the right image shows the default 1TB HD.

I am contemplating buying a firewire ssd. But looks like the results show that it makes things much worse. Or am I reading it wrong ?
 
Thanks hellhammer .. now how about Hybrid drive.

Drives like Momentus XT .. are they available on 3.5" for desktop? Or if I'd choose the 2.5" .. any significant improvement if I use it on FW800 .. or still much slower compared to pure SSD?

You know they much more cost effective. 500Gb momentus XT + 4Gb SSD buffering for around $100 .. how kind is that .. but I dont know how cool is that :D

Oh, and one more thing .. can we use that 4Gb SSD buffering as separated drive, accesible by user? Yes, of course it is ridiculously small :( But who knows there would be hybrid HDD + 32Gb SSD buffering in the future. That would be useful, eh?

Or is it managed internally by HDD controller as buffer or caching?
 
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Why not stick the SSD in the SATA bay and use it as your boot drive, and connect the mechanical HD with a Firewire 800 [or eSATA if you want one] connection?
 
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