Here's an update on this.
Having a rather "obsessive" personality about certain things like this, and never wanting to give up, I decided to start all over again. Reading all the user reviews for 1394b cards at NE, and reading all the manuals for the 1394b cards, I learned a few things. It would seem most of these controller cards either come with the Unibrain drivers, or the manufacturer actually "suggests" downloading the Unibrain drivers (if they don't come with the card). In the case of them not coming with the card and they are linked at the manufacturers' websites, on some occasions they were even linked as "FireWire 800 drivers" or something like that.
And again, in reading the reviews I saw that many mentioned Unibrain drivers having to be used in order to get FW800 or "faster" speeds
*. On one of the Syba cards, someone from Syba TS actually responded to one of the reviews saying, (to paraphrase), "3rd party drivers are available for FW800 from Unibrain".
I also saw in some of the manuals that the drivers should be installed
first before the card is installed.
Like I said, I tried the Unibrain drivers and they didn't work any better, and the card's original drivers are by OrangeWare (which also claims FW800 speeds). BTW, my card is only a 32-bit card. Many of these cards say they work in both a 32 or 64-bit slot. So since some of the cards are indeed 32-bit, and claim FW800, it would seem a 64-bit slot isn't really required.
*
So this all points to actual FW800 speeds being possible on XP (after SP1).
I'm going into details so that this may help others trying to do the same thing.
I uninstalled the card/drivers from the Device Manager (both the 1394 and LAN portions of it, LAN was "Disabled"), I uninstalled the Unibrain drivers, then did the restore.
Then I
first installed the Unibrain drivers. They "complain" about not being able to find something via 2 yellow marks in the Device Manager for "Unibrain PC". I put the card in a different PCI slot (slot #5, is only shared with slot #1 which has never been used), the started the PC. The yellow marks were resolved.
Drag 'n copy timed tests were previously inconsistent, probably because the HD was about 60% full, and we all know that even after defrag'ing files can still be all over the place and actually vary from time-to-time. So I reformatted the HD and left it empty.
After installing the drivers, I checked all "1394" areas in the Device Manager and saw no mention whatsoever of "1394
b" for any of the entries' Properties dialogs.
After installing the drivers, in the Program Files folder for Unibrain, there's a "Tools" folder and a
"ubSwitch" app. Clicking that puts an icon in the System Tray which gives one the ability to actually immediately switch between M$ and Unibrain drivers on-the-fly via left or right click. It would appear that by default, M$ drivers are used for one of the entries. I had two for some reason;
"OHCI compatible board" and
"IEEE 1394b (FireWire 800) adapter". The latter defaults to the M$ drivers. I made both Unibrain, and then the DM showed "1394
b" and "FireWire 800" as a description for one of the areas, "1394 bus host controller".
I then proceeded to do the (synthetic) benchmarks again with the 1394b tests of course being on the controller card, but with the 1394a tests being on my mobo's integrated 1394a controller. (I wanted to give 1394a an even better shot at being fast,
see post #6 here for details). As before, 1394b was significantly faster than 1394a. So I then did the "real world" right click drag 'n "copy" and drag and "move" timed tests. I also did the right click and drag 'n copy tests
on the drive itself, so the target HD would be doing both the reading and writing at the same time (a good torture test for a HD since those times are usually slower).
This time, unlike before, the 1394b tests
were a good bit faster. I haven't done all the math yet, but it would appear the timed tests are anywhere from 30 to 50% faster for 1394b, depending on the type of test. For one example (same for 3 tries), dragging a 2.91gb folder of .rar files from my HD103SJ to the FW HD (write) took 110 secs for 1394a and 71 secs for 1394b. That's about 26.45MB/sec Vs. 41MB/sec, and those are pretty impressive for write times. Right click, drag, and "Move"(ing) the folder
back to the HD103SJ was 97 secs for 1394a and 88 secs for 1394b.
Where 1394b really shined, was copying the folder onto itself; right click, drag, and "copy here" in the same root directory. 1394a took 5:12 & 5:17, 1394b took 3:34 and 3:25. That's a pretty big difference.
I then did the time tests with a more difficult 1.35gb folder consisting of all kinds of file types (116 folders, 564 files, of .txt, .html, .mht, .jpg, .gif, .bmp, .doc, .rtf, .reg, .zip, .exe, etc., etc.). Dragging and copying that folder from the HD103SJ to FW on 1394a took 52 secs (26MB/sec). 1394b took 36 secs (37.5MB/sec). (Both avg over 3 tries, all within 1 sec of each other). Then doing the right click and "copy here" for that folder (using the
1st one dragged over), 1394a was 2:24-2:30, 1394b was 1:46-1:43.
I also ran the FC-Test tests (
post #12, 3rd paragraph on this thread for FC-Test explanation). This was confusing, 1394b was still faster, but not by as large of an amount like the other tests.
Previously I had not run PCMark for the FW tests, but this time I did:
PCmark04
Results shown as 1394b / 1394a (In MB/sec)
Total score: 4435 / 4053
XP startup: 8.031 / 7.635
App loading: 6.906 / 6.422
File copying: 25.315 / 19.716
General HDD usage: 5.733 / 5.392
PCmark05
Results shown as 1394b / 1394a (In MB/sec)
Total score: 4447 / 3602
XP startup: 8.068 / 7.67
App loading: 6.869 / 6.472
General HDD usage: 5.748 / 5.387
Virus scan: 47.652 / 31.870
HDD file write: 47.141 / 29.289
For those that aren't familiar with PCMark tests, tenths actually make a much larger difference on their tests than is normally the case with other benchmarks. A drive that is
actually literally twice as fast as another,
will not get twice as high scores.
*So the question remains, are the "faster speeds"
actually really 1394b FW800 speeds, or something just in between?? In keeping with the
theoretically "twice as fast speeds" going from one protocol to a newer one
not ever being actually twice as fast, FW800 should not actually be twice as fast as FW400. Because SATA300 isn't anywhere near twice as fast as SATA150 and SATA6 isn't anywhere near twice as fast as SATA300. UDMA66 was not twice as fast as UDMA33, and UMDA133 is not twice as fast as UDMA66. Etc. So I might "guess" that FW800 may actually in reality maybe be only 40-50% faster than FW400, and
maybe I am getting true FW800 speeds??
I'm still wondering if a different controller card (or 64-bit card) would be faster (again, see post #6 linked above as to why), or if doing some XP driver file hacks would make it even faster. I've seen some that replaced some XP 1394 driver files with some from Vista, and got better results. I've also replaced some XP SP3 files with SP2 files to get back certain features that the M$ morons removed from SP3. So that's why I had asked about possible 1394 file changes in Win7, wondering if I could find out that list and possibly get those files and try them on XP. More so because from what I've heard the 1394b issue is still a bit of an issue on Vista.
But at least now at this point, I am getting significantly better performance with 1394b over that of 1394a on
all tests. I don't know if it was due to not installing the card-supplied drivers and using the Unibrain drivers, or installing the Unibrain drivers
first before installing the card, or using a different PCI slot, or a combo of all of the above. I'm more inclined to believe it was due to
only using the Unibrain drivers and installing them first. (And again, be sure you put the "ubSwitch" icon in the System Tray and the Unibrain drivers are loaded).
-Clint
