Real life transfer speed of USB 1.1 Hard drive?

[Eug]

I'm just wondering what the real life transfer speed of large amounts of files under USB 1.1 is.

Sandra says my IBM 75GXP Firewire drive (Oxford 911) can hit around 35 MB/s, but I've just finished transferring 21.4 GB (23,041,974,395) of MP3 files and it took about 22 minutes. That's about 17 MB/s, which is about 1/2 of the top speed of the drive, and about 1/3 of the theoretical maximum of Firewire. The drives are: source - IDE IBM75GXP (NTFS), target - Firewire IBM 75GXP (FAT32). Win XP. With a disc image I was getting speeds of about 19-20 MB/s. EDIT: Oops, these are WRITE speeds I'm measuring, not Sandra's read speeds.

I've been asked, and I don't know the answer: What is the REAL LIFE improvement of Firewire over USB 1.1?

My guess is that USB 1.1 hard drives don't hit the theoretical max of 1.5 MB/s and are more along the lines of about 1 MB/s with usual file transfers, which makes Firewire about 20X faster. I would assume that USB 2.0 is about the same as Firewire, but I don't know anyone who has done real life tests (not just Sandra and HDTach).

Anybody know for sure?

EDIT again:

Hmmmm... Just found this on Tom's. It seems that USB 1.1 can barely even hit 0.79 MB/s for reads and only about 0.64 MB/s for writes. So that would make this firewire setup about 26X the speed of USB 1.1. Thus my 22 minute copy would have taken 9.5 HOURS on USB 1.1. :Q (However, I dunno if the drive tested there is representative.)

Anyone have USB 2.0 numbers?

 

[Lord Evermore]

Article on one particular USB2.0 drive, compared to USB1.1 and ATA66.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/storage/hyundai-cutie/

USB2.0 has the bandwidth available to allow the throughput of a drive to actually pass; USB1.1 doesn't. ATA66 has enough extra bandwidth that the burst speeds of a drive aren't limited as well, so it exceeds USB2.0 and would exceed Firewire as well, but other than that, Firewire and USB2.0 have plenty of bandwidth for the average drive (bursting doesn't happen when you're transferring large amounts of data all at once).

This drive did a bit better in USB1.1 mode than Tom's says. Still not full USB speed though, and this may be due to limitations in the converting from IDE to USB.

 

[Eug]

Linkified

Thanks. That's a notebook drive though so of course it's gonna be slower than mine. I wonder if anyone has done the IBM 75GXP or similar speed drive with USB 2. The reason I ask is because I want to know what the overhead of Firewire and USB 2 are (since they'll never reach theoretical max).