[DM-MUG] External Harddrives

[Matthew W.]

I thought with the drive technologies out there now, that eSATA and  
FW800 would both be roughly similar. With a single drive or JBOD  
(multiple drives configured to look like one big drive), they will be  
similar in speed & value.

I fired up my old fave barefeats.com and found a couple of eSATA  
shootouts. Nothing that really compared or contrasted FW800 and eSATA  
stood out. So, I e-mailed the guy. Even after 5+ years the guy still  
answers e-mails personally.

> They are in a different league.
>
> If you are talking about a 2 drive RAID 0 set [striped], the empty  
> eSATA set is 80% faster on capture or write speed, as you can see  
> here:
> http://barefeats.com/hard85.html
>
> If you are talking about a 5 drive port multiplier RAID 0 set  
> (single cable going from the Mac Pro to a 5 drive box), the eSATA  
> set is at least 239% faster (69MB/s vs 234MB/s).
>
> You see, the FW800 RAID is limited by the 800 megabit per second  
> interface which translates to something around 80MB/s read speed  
> and even lower write speed (69MB/s) no matter how many drives you  
> put in the box. The eSATA RAID on a single 3G port has 3000 megabit  
> per second bandwidth.
>
> And if you use multiple eSATA ports to feed the four or five drives  
> in a non-PM box, then each drive has the 3G bandwidth. In that  
> case, five eSATA drives would be 321% faster (60MB/s vs 291MB/s).
>
> FW800 is fine for a backup system where speed is not critical. But  
> for speed critical applications like HD video capture, eSATA is the  
> way to go.

I'm still fond of FW800 for convenience and portability (AFAIK, no  
Macs have eSATA EXTERNAL ports yet), and cost, however once you cross  
the line into RAID, eSATA stands alone.

Mw