Is firewire faster that IDE ??

[renorocks]

I want to buy a backup hard drive. I was thinking either an ide drive in a removeable bay (connected to the internal udma33 port in my computer) or an external fire wire drive.
After reading all of the specs. on both drives throuput, xfer rates, read & write speed, rpm I AM NOW TOTALLY CONFUSED.

Is fire wire faster than a standard UDMA 33 IDE port ??
Does getting a 7200 rpm drive make a difference with firewire when considering that maybe a 5400 rpm drive can read / write faster than the firewire bus can transmit the data?

Please help:
jr

 

[trek]

Firewire is way faster than IDE. I think the HD will limit the speed though...

-Trek

 

[Noriaki]

FireWire is 50MB/s.

Faster than ATA33, but slower than 66.

Even the fastest IDE hard drives we have now can only sustain around 40MB/s.

 

[bex0rs]

Most of the external add-your-own-hard-drive firewire enclosures out right now only support transfer rates of up to about 16MB/s, if you take a look at the specs. (That being a limitation of early generation 1394->IDE bridge boards)

Edit: BTW, I did a bit of research on this topic a while back, and a found a review of a decent looking unit with one of the newer bridge boards here.

~bex0rs

 

[Pariah]

Firewire has more potential bandwidth than UDMA33, but an IDE drive on an UDMA33 connector will be faster than in a firewire enclosure even with the latest firewire-IDE bridges. I bought a WD firewire drive a while back, it was a 5400RPM drive that I replaced with a WD400BB 7200 drive. This drive is capable of mid 30's STR but maxed across the drive at 11MB/s in the firewire enclosure. Access time was also off by almost 2ms. The new bridges are supposed to be capable of 27MB/s or so, which though much better, is still quite a bit slower than the drive's capabilities not including the hit to access time.