Firewire: Fast Enough?

[nufan292]

I am wondering if it is possible to run games/applications off of a firewire external HD? Of course my OS is on my main drive, but is it possible is transfer rate high enough? Any help would be great. Thank you for your time.

 

[mosco]

Have you read about Firewire 2?

 

[GonzoDaGr8]

Originally posted by: mosco
Have you read about Firewire 2?

Also known as Firewire800. 800Mb per sec transfer rates. Not sure if Firewire800 cards are available yet for PC. It is native on G5 Mac'a though(IIRC).

 

[GonzoDaGr8]

Originally posted by: nufan292
I am wondering if it is possible to run games/applications off of a firewire external HD? Of course my OS is on my main drive, but is it possible is transfer rate high enough? Any help would be great. Thank you for your time.

Probably could, But one would think that level load times would be much greater than on a normal IDE channel.

 

[Metalloid]

Originally posted by: GonzoDaGr8

Originally posted by: mosco
Have you read about Firewire 2?

Also known as Firewire800. 800Mb per sec transfer rates. Not sure if Firewire800 cards are available yet for PC. It is native on G5 Mac'a though(IIRC).

Megabits of Megabytes? I know that Firewire was 50 Megabytes/second, so 800 Megabits/second (100 MegaBytes/second) wouldn't be all that spectacular...

 

[Hyperfocal]

Firewire's plenty fast.

It isn't SATA fast, but I haven't had any problems capturing uncompressed AVIs to my firewire drive.

 

[fredtam]

Originally posted by: Metalloid

Originally posted by: GonzoDaGr8

Originally posted by: mosco
Have you read about Firewire 2?

Also known as Firewire800. 800Mb per sec transfer rates. Not sure if Firewire800 cards are available yet for PC. It is native on G5 Mac'a though(IIRC).

Megabits of Megabytes? I know that Firewire was 50 Megabytes/second, so 800 Megabits/second (100 MegaBytes/second) wouldn't be all that spectacular...

With the sustained transfer of todays hard drives I don't see where if firewire is at 50Mb/s there would be a problem and there surely wouldn't be a problem if it had 80Mb/s pipeline if that is the FW2 spec. You would need a Raid 0 to come close. If the HDD, say ata100 had to sustain a transfer rate it would deplete the cache after a few 100Mb burst and then transfer around 25 - 40Mbs/s.

 

[nufan292]

Would it be at least comparable to a 5400rpm HD? About the FW800 I could get a card, but I don't really want to if possible. Plus the cost of a 1394b enclosure comes at a high premium. If I were planning on getting a new PCcard (by the way this is on a notebook), I might consider getting a SATA card.

 

[jonesthewine]

I have an external hard drive, maxtor 160GB, with usb2.0 and firewire ports, for backups...have run some older games(eg Wolfenstein) w/ no probs via the usb connection.

 

[ViRGE]

You can't get an SATA card for a laptop, so a Firewire card and an external drive are the way to go. For a laptop, that will be more than enough.

 

[EeyoreX]

With the sustained transfer of todays hard drives I don't see where if firewire is at 50Mb/s there would be a problem and there surely wouldn't be a problem if it had 80Mb/s pipeline if that is the FW2 spec. You would need a Raid 0 to come close. If the HDD, say ata100 had to sustain a transfer rate it would deplete the cache after a few 100Mb burst and then transfer around 25 - 40Mbs/s.

Translation: Hard drives can not even saturate ATA66s max speed. If IEEE1394 can have speeds up to 50MB/s you'll be fine.

It isn't SATA fast

SATA drives aren't SATA fast either. Current SATA spec is rated to a max speed of 150MB/s. Not even the ATA drive with the current fastest spin speed (Western Digital Raptor at 10,000 rpm) can flood SATAs current pipes. It's a pity that current hard drive mechanics will never allow them to spin fast enough to saturate this bus speed. And good thing SATA300 is coming soon!!! Another tool marketing people can use to make silly claims that aren't true <cough>Masxtor's ATA133<cough>.

\Dan

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: EeyoreX
Another tool marketing people can use to make silly claims that aren't true <cough>Masxtor's ATA133<cough>.

In Maxtor's own defense here, ATA133 did solve the identification problems related to IDing which boards/cards support 48bit LBA. Whereas there's no sure with with ATA100 on down, you can be sure that every device that supports ATA133 will support 48bit LBA.

 

[Rmex]

Firewire 400 will be fine for a hard drive, like someone said above no drive saturates ATA 66 yet so firewire will be fine.

What you will want to look out for though is seek time. If you go firewire then make sure you get a drive with the lowest seek time cause that is where the difference will be seen the most with FW.

 

[Pariah]

Translation: Hard drives can not even saturate ATA66s max speed. If IEEE1394 can have speeds up to 50MB/s you'll be fine.

The limit with firewire enclosures is not the firewire interface, but the firewire-to-ATA bridge which tops out around 35-40MB/s. That's well below the capabilities of all available HD's today. With PATA drives topping out at 60MB/s, a 40+% reduction in maximum throughput is quite significant. Will you still be able to run games and apps off it? Absolutely, but it WILL be noticably slower than running in native ATA mode when transferring or loading large files.

And good thing SATA300 is coming soon!!! Another tool marketing people can use to make silly claims that aren't true <cough>Masxtor's ATA133<cough>.

Just because you don't know anything about SATA II, doesn't mean you should blindly dismiss it as worthless marketing. The doubling of bandwidth will be of use with SATA II because of the addition of port multipliers which will allow more than one drive per cable, through the use of "hubs." SATA II also adds an external cable specification, native command queuing, manageability and backplane signaling. SATA II drives will also be cross compatible with SAS controllers. Even without the doubling of throughput, SATA II is everything SATA I should have been but wasn't.

 

[EeyoreX]

In Maxtor's own defense here, ATA133 did solve the identification problems related to IDing which boards/cards support 48bit LBA. Whereas there's no sure with with ATA100 on down, you can be sure that every device that supports ATA133 will support 48bit LBA.

Yes, that's true. But it also led to confusion (people saying ATA133 controllers were required for 48-bit support, causing people to get rid of perfectly good controllers for no reason). And my beef was with the advertising the speed factor, which is untrue. I have nothing else against Maxtor. My main rig is loaded with 3 Maxtor drives.

The limit with firewire enclosures is not the firewire interface, but the firewire-to-ATA bridge which tops out around 35-40MB/s. That's well below the capabilities of all available HD's today. With PATA drives topping out at 60MB/s, a 40+% reduction in maximum throughput is quite significant. Will you still be able to run games and apps off it? Absolutely, but it WILL be noticably slower than running in native ATA mode when transferring or loading large files.

PATA drives may "top out" at 60MB/s. Maybe in a RAID0 configuration under the best possible conditions. Speeds that fast are far from common. 30-40MB/s is well below the maximum theoretical speed, but not so far (and often times not at all) below real-world speeds of the drives in use. Also, since I believe he mentioned this was for a laptop, chances are good he's limited to 4200 or 5400 rpm, unless he has one of the few higher end laptops with the new 7200 rpm drives. I doubt he will notice the difference in this case.

Just because you don't know anything about SATA II, doesn't mean you should blindly dismiss it as worthless marketing. The doubling of bandwidth will be of use with SATA II because of the addition of port multipliers which will allow more than one drive per cable, through the use of "hubs." SATA II also adds an external cable specification, native command queuing, manageability and backplane signaling. SATA II drives will also be cross compatible with SAS controllers. Even without the doubling of throughput, SATA II is everything SATA I should have been but wasn't.

My bad here, however I don't think you should just blindly assume what I do and do not know... I didn't mean to dismiss SATA II in it's entirety. I do realize there are several features that will be an improvement over the current version. I just feel it's too bad that more likely than not (in an attempt to woo less than savvy consumers) that the spec will be touted as being "faster than SATA I!!" While, in theory, that is true, that is not going to be the reason SATA II is going to be of great benefit (except to manufacturers). It will be for the other things included in the spec. But Joe Q Computer-Buyer will only understand "It's twice as fat!!" when the reality is that it isn't. Consumers will blindly buy the technology thinking they are getting "double the speed" when they are in reality not. If SATA II is marketed on real-world benefits over the false promise (with current drive technology) of massive speed increases then I'll retract my statement. Again, sorry for not being clear.

\Dan

 

[McCarthy]

Yes, it's fine. Rarely if ever will you notice any decrease from onboard IDE.

 

[Czar]

its fast enough, I have done dv video editing off one without any problems

 

[nufan292]

Thanks for all the help, extremely like this place.