This past weekend, i went out to look for a Firewire enclosure for my Mac Mini so that i can expand on my storage a bit for all the photo’s I take. I like to keep at least 2 if not 3 copies of all of my pictures.
At my local Frys, I picked up an Acomdata 3.5″ enclosure which sported USB2.0 and Firewire interfaces, for only $39.99. A bit steep, but i wanted something to test with. After getting home, and plugging in a 500gb Seagate ST3500630AS drive (got one back from Seagate after a previous one failed), i did some quick testing.
On Windows, using MTIReadWrite, i was able to see about 20mbytes sustained read/write over a 2gb file. I found that to be dreadful. So i went up to the Mac Mini, and tried something similar. Using the command
dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=16k count=64k
I averaged 28mbytes/sec over a few runs. A bit better, but still dreadful. USB can match that easily (although i didn’t actually test USB on this device, but form past experience, 30mbytes/sec is the max i’ve ever gotten from a USB interface to a disk). Doing some math, Firewire is 400mbits/sec which is equal to 47.68mbytes a sec raw throughput at 400mbits. So, expecting anything more than 47mbytes/sec is madness. I didn’t try a Firewire 800 device since the Mac Mini only has Firewire400m, and so does my PC.
So, Firewire is slow in today’s market. It was a heck of a lot a faster than a DNS-321 from DLINK that i tried in the same weekend, that thing was REALLY slow, only 18mbytes/sec throughput – on gige with jumbo frames. Useless.
The only cool thing about Firewire, is that you can daisy chain them. Although, i daisy chained two together on my Mac Mini, and it dropped read and write speeds down to 17mbytes/sec each – when simultaneously reading or writing from both Firewire drives.
If you’re looking for fast external storage, i think eSata is the only way to go at this point. Pity we can’t daisy chain them together.