IDE vs FIREWIRE vs SATA??? Makes no sense!

[mi1stormilst]

Last night I hooked up an external FIREWIRE drive, I was amazed at how quickly I can pull and drop files on this thing. Honestly it seems faster then my IDE drives, I am guessing that FIREWIRE (even 400) is simply faster in everyway compared to SATA or IDE connections?

SATA = 150MBPS
IDE = 133MBPS

FIREWIRE = 400MBPS (or 800MBPS)

I am also under the impression that FIREWIRE multi-threads better then the other two standards as well.
Why the "F" is the industry mucking around with hard drive interfaces? It seems they should have just allowed FIREWIRE to be the primary connection on your MOBO for drives? Even more frusterating SATA II only promises 300MBPS where FIREWIRE 800 already exists...someone have any answers besides the PC industry being to pridefull to adopt an APPLE sanctioned standard?

)-:

 

[JBT]

No single hard drive can sustain throughput over the regular ATA 66 standard so havning more is pretty useless. Well my Raptor does about 62MBps.

Also both USB2.0 and firewire do not actually work at the rated speeds. yes USB2.0 is slower than firewire but I don't think firewire is actually faster than IDE and SATA.

 

[gsellis]

Firewire (a) is 400 Mbps - Megabits... aka 50 MBps

 

[mi1stormilst]

Correct but does that does not take into consideration that it multi-threads, also since when do specs for competing formats have to live by the same rules? I am telling you it seems faster to me?

http://www.barefeats.com/hard35.html

 

[Pariah]

99% of firewire drives are ATA drives in an enclosure with an ATA to firewire bridge. Native firewire drives are so rare they might as well not exist. There's no way to bridge a drive to a different interface and make it run faster than it does natively. The best firewire bridges will reduce peak STR by about a 1/3rd for today's fastest drives, so drives in a firewire enclosure are always slower than their identical ATA conterpart running on an ATA controller.

Also, hard drives don't "multithread" or anything like it. As noted above, firewire speeds are given in megabits, not megabytes like ATA does so firewire 400 and 800 are 50MB/s and 100MB/s respectively, giving them a theoretical lower throughput than both ATA 133 and SATA.

 

[JBT]

Originally posted by: gsellis
Firewire (a) is 400 Mbps - Megabits... aka 50 MBps

I was going to say that but I wasn't sure so I figured if it was true someone else would say it. If perhaps you think your Firewire drive is alot faster than your regular IDE drive maybe it is. What do you have for your system disk???

 

[mi1stormilst]

Well perhaps it is a comnination of things, NFORCE II IDE Drivers? Rounded IDE Cables? Different drives? Different connections to the MOBO? My WDSE 80GB is on the mobo via rounded IDE vs Samsung 80GB connected via FIREWIRE. Perhaps it is possible that the chip on my external drive cage just performs better then the onboard IDE connection? I don't know perhaps I will run some benchmarks on it tonight.

 

[LED]

I've done some benches on these protocols:

Standard Card Flash on USB High Speed

External HD on USB HiSpeed

Firewire800

Firewire800 CDTach

Firewire 400 (left) vs USB HiSpeed...Same Drive

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Barefeats link detected - poster credibility set to null.



Seriously, that guy slings so much BS under the guise of "news and reviews" that he should start sending out flyers to farmers.

As pointed out, it's a scant few drives that can even break the ATA66 throughput - and Firewire/USB is rated in megabits per second. Divide by eight and factor in CPU usage.

- M4H

 

[Pariah]

Benchmarking firewire isn't worth the effort for interface comparison purposes because the performance is directly connected to the bridge chip whose performance can vary WIDELY from chip to chip. Some of the earlier chip topped out aroun 10MB/s, while the best chips today top out around 40MB/s, still well below today's ATA drives that max around 60MB/s.

If you're going to spend the time benchmarking hard drives, why would then turn it into a waste of time by using Sandra? Probably the worst HD benchmark available.

 

[gsellis]

It boils down to this.

A Firewire drive should not be faster than your internal ATA drive (unless the IDE stuff/drive is old technology).

A Firewire drive should be slightly faster (25MB vs 21MB as a rough max compare) than a USB 2.0 drive.

A Firewire drive is fast enough for DV video capture.

A Firewire drive is portable, but if you take it to a friends house, bring your host card as not everyone has Firewire.

A Firewire data device streams better than a USB one, which makes it more reliable for doing things with external DVD writers.

 

[mi1stormilst]

Interesting, thanks for all your input, I did jump the gun on the whole MBps vs Mbps thing )-: This device allows for both USB2/USB1.1/FIREWIRE connections. It does seem more then quick I am very suprised by the response and transfer speeds. I am gonna benchmark it anyway to satisfy my curiosity (-:

 

[mi1stormilst]

Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire
Barefeats link detected - poster credibility set to null.



Seriously, that guy slings so much BS under the guise of "news and reviews" that he should start sending out flyers to farmers.

As pointed out, it's a scant few drives that can even break the ATA66 throughput - and Firewire/USB is rated in megabits per second. Divide by eight and factor in CPU usage.

- M4H

I just came across his site today doing some googles )-: Didn't know we was a goof and unreliable (-; Sorry.