external firewire drive vs. GB ethernet server

[Tostada]

My friend's wife works with DV on her PowerBook. She stores a lot of footage on an external firewire drive. He wants me to upgrade his machine so that she can use cheaper internal drives in his machine across the LAN for storage.

Video editing on a laptop just seems like a bad idea to me, but apparently she does just fine on her 17" PowerBook G4. I think all of those have GB ethernet so I was probably going to suggest that this would be a good excuse to upgrade his Athlon XP 1800 to perhaps a Sempron 2800 on a NF3 250Gb board. Something better would be nice but I figure he can get the board/CPU/memory and a new PSU for just over $250 or get a whole new case for just under $300.

I'm really interested if anybody has experience in the performance you get on a firewire drive vs. sharing files over gigabit ethernet. Your standard firewire drive is going to be firewire 400 = about 40 MB/sec, vs gigabit ethernet which would be about 100 MB/sec, right? In reality I don't think she's getting very good speed from her firewire drives so I'd like to know what the actual potential is for firewire vs. GB ethernet.

I'm assuming it would just be stupid to add a PCI GB LAN card and use that. I saw a long time ago that some 250Gb boards use the NVidia GB lan and some actually use chips which are slower. Anybody know if the cheap Biostar K8NHA Grand is a good one?

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=13-138-240

 

[Pariah]

The speed limiting factor is the woman's laptop hard drive which is unlikely to be pushing more than about 30MB/s peak. Good firewire enclosures can push about 35MB/s so they already exceed the bottleneck, there would be no point in "upgrading" to Gb ethernet which I put in quotes since it likely wouldn't be faster in any scenario. That said, as opposed to being stupid, adding a Gb lan card is exactly what you should be doing. Upgrading the guy's entire computer to upgrade the LAN speed for external laptop storage is what I would consider stupid. When the their goal is to save money, spending $300 where $30 will acheive the same affect is dumb. For that additional $270, they might as well stick with firewire as that will get them an additional 5 or 6 external enclosures which they can install internal drives.

 

[Tostada]

Pariah: You're making bad assumptions. Your post is condescending and useless. I didn't ask whether GB ethernet would be "stupid" because it was faster than her internal drive. I asked about the performance difference between an external firewire enclosure vs. sharing over GB ethernet. Good enclosures cost about $50 and you need one for each drive. Sharing files from a PC means you can get multiple drives and get the ones with the best cost per GB. Certainly you understand that upgrading his PC to something that is 3X as fast as his current one is useful beyond having functionality as a file server. It is something he will have to do before too long anyway.

She's doing video editing from a laptop. The laptop has a single 5400 RPM drive. Obviously she's not going to be working exclusively from the internal drive so it really doesn't matter the slightest bit if the internal drive can only push 35MB/sec. To the contrary, it would be an extremely useful upgrade if sharing files over GB ethernet could perhaps give her double the speed of working from her internal drive.

 

[Pariah]

I didn't ask whether GB ethernet would be "stupid" because it was faster than her internal drive. I asked about the performance difference between an external firewire enclosure vs. sharing over GB ethernet.

You are apparently having trouble reading, since I at no point said Gbit would be stupid because it was faster than her internal drive, especially considering Gbit will probably be slower than both the drive and the enclosure. It's unlikely a laptop ethernet port will transmit more than about 25MB/s and Gbit ethernet will put a hurting on the CPU slowing overall system performance as well while firewire will offload most of the work.

Good enclosures cost about $50 and you need one for each drive.

Which is a whole lot cheaper than spending $300 to replace his motherboard, CPU and RAM which makes practically no sense. Let's see, $300 divided by $50 equal 6, just like I said above where they could buy 5 or 6 enclosures for the price you are proposing.

Video editing to a remote Gbit drive on a laptop would be an awful idea as stated above the hit the CPU would take would make it quite a bit slower all the way around on top of the slower storage speed. If that's her goal it would be much better to go with the firewire drive.

 

[AnMig]

I think the author only means to use the external device (firewire or ext device via gblan) for storage and retrieval of edited material. "She stores a lot of footage on an external firewire drive."

What i think he is trying to find out is if file transfer (saving, retrieval of large files) is faster thru firewire or GBit LAN.

"It's unlikely a laptop ethernet port will transmit more than about 25MB/s"
Some laptops have GBLAn capability (Dell XPS 2) so the connection should be GBlan--Gblan

Dont know the answer just trying to clarify the question.

Peace

 

[Pariah]

I know what he is asking, and I've said multiple times, the firewire solution will be faster. He said the Powerbook had Gbit lan support, and as I said, it should be capable of about 25MB/s which is well in exess of the theoretical 12.5MB/s 100Mbps throughput.

Again though, he said these people are trying to save money, not get the best performance. For about $30 he can install a Gbit LAN card in to the desktop and be done with it. If $40-50 per enclosure is too much for them, I fail to see how spending $300 (enough to buy enclosures for well over 1 TB of space) to replace the guy's motherboard, CPU and RAM just to get an onboard Gbit LAN port makes any sense at all.

 

[Tostada]

Originally posted by: Pariah
Gbit will probably be slower than both the drive and the enclosure. It's unlikely a laptop ethernet port will transmit more than about 25MB/s and Gbit ethernet will put a hurting on the CPU slowing overall system performance as well while firewire will offload most of the work.

This is what I was asking. I appreciate the replies even though you appear to be assuming I'm a moron. I know they won't really be saving money upgrading the whole system so she can use it as a file server, but it was his idea. I think he's looking for an excuse to upgrade his PC.

So, you really think 25MB/s is all a PowerBook is capable of over GB LAN? I've never been able to run any file transfer benchmarks over GB LAN, but I'm a little surprised it'd be that slow. I guess even the fastest 7200RPM drives are only hitting 35MB/s towards the inner tracks, so maybe it's not that much of an issue.

You're saying Firewire uses a lot less CPU power than GB LAN? Sounds like that could make the enclosure the clear leader.

 

[Pariah]

If he wants to upgrade his whole system, then do it, but make sure to let him know that upgrading everything will actually do nothing to solve the original problem they are asking you to solve.

GigE even between PC's usually won't transfer much above about 35MB/s using consumer level equipment (lowend cards, 32bit PCI, no jumbo frames, etc). I can imagine Apple didn't put the highest quality controller in a laptop simply because there's no reason to.

Yes, firewire will use less CPU than GigE will, but taking into account price vs performance vs usability, I'd still go with simply installing a cheap Intel GigE card in the PC and connecting the laptop and PC directly (no switch needed) as the best option. They already have a firewire enclosure to work from as a scratch disk, the PC will be fine for longterm storage.

Also, I don't think you are a moron, it just looks like you are favoring an option that costs way more than what the person actually needs. Like a sleezy mechanic doing all sorts of work you don't need that is unrelated to the original problem and jacking the price up. If it's your own system, spend away, but I really don't like seeing when people ask the "geek" friend for help upgrading or whatever, and the friend recommends an A64 3800+ with a GB of RAM for surfing the internet or something like that. I'd be pissed if asked for help, and found out I was sold something I didn't need that cost me a whole lot more than what I could have spent. I'm not really singling you out, as I see it on these boards all the time, where people are foolishly recommending complete overkill components and basically throwing other people's money away who don't know better.