Firewire questions

imudimud
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
Hi all, I don't know a whole lot about firewire so please fill in the gaps or point me to some sites with info.



Question 1: Are firewire external hard drives as fast as internal drives?



Question 2: Can you create a RAID with several external firewire hard drives?



question 3: Would accessing a firewire harddrive on a powermac with say an ibook via airport be slow?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    ebbyebby Posts: 3,110member
    1) No. I read firewire is the same speed as a ATA33 drive

    2) Yes. <a href="http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/pg22a_firewireidehotswapraid_1.htm"; target="_blank">Granite Digital</a>

    3) Firewire = 400Mbps, Airport = 11Mbps. So yes, very slow. *I get Bites/Bytes confused, take with salt.
  • Reply 2 of 2
    lucaluca Posts: 3,833member
    [quote]Originally posted by Ebby:

    Firewire = 400Mbps, Airport = 11Mbps. So yes, very slow. *I get Bites/Bytes confused, take with salt.<hr></blockquote>



    Yep, they're in the same units. For more comparisons, here are speeds (all in those same units, mega-bits per second) for a number of other interfaces:



    Ethernet: 10, 100 or 1000

    Airport (802.11): 11

    USB: 12

    FireWire: 400

    USB2: 480 (but slower in practice!)

    Ultra160 SCSI: 1280

    Ultra320 SCSI: 2560



    For mega-bytes per second, just divide each number by 8. So 10base-T ethernet, Airport, and USB all transfer at around 1.2-1.5MB/sec, FireWire is about 50, Ultra160 SCSI is 160, and Ultra320 SCSI is 320.
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