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Whats faster eSata or Firewire 800?

P

peterjun

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 2, 2007
48
0
I just realized that I can't write to my external I currently have cause its formatted in NTFS so I need to look for a new external hardrive.

I have a macbook pro currently and was wondering what would be faster - a eSata drive or a Firewire 800 drive. Also what cards would I need in order to be able to read eSata hardrives?


I'm hearing lacie externals are pretty good, is this one pretty good for video editing?
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10894
 
peterjun said:
I just realized that I can't write to my external I currently have cause its formatted in NTFS so I need to look for a new external hardrive.

I have a macbook pro currently and was wondering what would be faster - a eSata drive or a Firewire 800 drive. Also what cards would I need in order to be able to read eSata hardrives?


I'm hearing lacie externals are pretty good, is this one pretty good for video editing?
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10894
Click to expand...

Can't you just reformat the drive?

eSata is faster, but I don't have the numbers off hand but someone should, or do a quick search of the forums to see if it has been answered already.

eSata isn't a type of hard drive per-se, it's a connection interface and you will need to get a eSata express card.

As for a drive, I prefer Seagate (search forums again for this). Also, I usually buy an internal and throw it into an enclosure myself.
 
http://www.barefeats.com/hard71.html

It indicates that eSATA and firewire 800 are both quite a bit faster than the MBP internal HD, however they think eSata will be a little faster than firewire 800. To use eSata on the MAcBook Pro, you need to buy an eSata express 34 host card, and everything you need to get it running should be in the box!
 
First off you should be able to format your current external into HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) with Disk Utility.

Anyways the Lacie's are generally overpriced and you do not know what brand of hard drives you are really getting. Really, the best method for both price and performance is to purchase an external enclosure and install a hard drive into the enclosure. This is quite easy to do.

As for the hard drive to purchase I would recommend a larger drive, 500GB minimum. You would not believe how quickly video will eat up disk space. My recommendations for the different components to purchase are at the end of this post.

My recommendations for an interface would be for e-sata for two main reasons.

1. External Firewire 800 enclosures are very expensive. On newegg.com the cheapest enclosure runs $70 while you can purchase an express card for esata for $35 and a well rated enclosure for another $35 to $40. This price difference would be far more noticeable if a second external is purchased.

2. While no current hard drive will max out either standard. As I recall, one controller is used to run both firewire 400 and 800 on the Macbook Pro. So if a firewire 400 device is attached, such as a camcorder the speed defaults at 400mbps which some current hard drives can max out. While a separate esata hard drive will not take any hits in performance.

For selecting a hard drive a recently responded to another post that is applicable for you too.
velocityg4 said:
I find tomshardware guide to be extremely useful.

Since you are looking at large hard drives the Western Digital 750GB Caviar SE 16 WD7500AAKS just got a very favorable review.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/07/06/record-making_hard_disk/

For general reviews:
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/index.html

For the Hard Disk Charts:
http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage.html


These charts are extremely useful when choosing a hard drive. It consists of quite a thorough list of hard drives. You can compare two hard drives against each other and see how they compare against other hard drives, as well. When using this list make sure to check the ENTIRE model number.

There are also updates to lines that do not show up in the Hard Disk Guide, hence the importance of checking entire model numbers. I was looking at the Hitachi T7k500 HDT725032VLA380 320GB SATA II hard drive that got really high marks the the hard disk charts compared to other hard drives. Then I ended up getting the T7K500 HDT725032VLA360 it was nearly identical in the technologies incorporated in the previous model rated on TomsHardware; Native Command Queing, Perpindicular Recording, Low Surface Temps. The only difference between the two is that the new one I got had a higher disk cache 16MB versus 8MB.
Click to expand...

For the adapter card this one from Rosewill gets good reviews, it is cheap, has two ports, and is Mac compatible.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16839200006

For a hard drive I like Hitachi they are what I currently use. Since they are fast, relatively quite, and relatively cool when compared to other drives I have owned and going by reviews I have found
For 500GB: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145137
If you want 320GB Seagate is good: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148140

As for the enclosure these are pretty ugly looking but have good customer reviews and are cheap.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817145167
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817173043

If you want a pretty one it will cost you. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817198011

Some other things to think about. How important are your videos, you may want a second hard drive for backing up files as DVD backup is quite time consuming and a failed hard drive is a major pain, make backups. What format to use with the hard drive, for most uses HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) will work fine, Mac OS extended (Journaled) is not really necessary. Though Journaled is the default selection it is really for RAID arrays and Servers, the Journaled System does impact system performance and generally is not very useful for single drives on a standalone desktop or laptop.
 
Would an external hard drive be more durable than an enclosure when taking it on the road?

If you had two hard drives in one enclosure, could you use them as completely separate drives or would it automatically recognize them as a single drive?

:)
 
bluestlight said:
Would an external hard drive be more durable than an enclosure when taking it on the road?
Click to expand...

Same thing, for the most part. It really depends on the build quality. Obviously an enclosure that the drive rattles around in is not good... but most I've seen are snug and/or have screws to hold things in place.

bluestlight said:
If you had two hard drives in one enclosure, could you use them as completely separate drives or would it automatically recognize them as a single drive?
Click to expand...

It depends on the chip / onboard software on the enclosure. Some are automatically RAID-1 (mirror), some are auto RAID-0 (stripe), some JBOD and some two volumes.

Just look at the specs of what you buy; It will tell you the configuration options if there are any, and how drives will be accessed.
 
ab2650 said:
Same thing, for the most part. It really depends on the build quality. Obviously an enclosure that the drive rattles around in is not good... but most I've seen are snug and/or have screws to hold things in place.
Click to expand...

Thanks! I was thinking an external hard drive might perform better on the go (with an internal fan, etc.), but if heat's not an issue and they're both robust, one could really go either way.
 
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