I'm looking at getting the Mach VIII 60gb 7200rpm drive from firewiredirect. Does anyone have any experience of them or know of any better alternatives? How does it compare to the Spark 800?
Since no-one responded I went and got the 7200 rpm 60gb Mach VIII anyway. And it's bloody great. Looks beautiful, and left my old 30gb Firelite in the dust, copying a folder of 750 TIFFS (1.16gb) in 48 seconds, versus the Firelite at 1min 35secs. I do believe that's twice as fast.
But here's where I'm confused - the copy time was the same whether I used the Firewire 800 cable, or the 400. Both came out at exactly the same time. (copying from a G4 15" Powerbook with 5400rpm drive)
That is very interesting. I just bought a couple of Fantom 250GB drives (waiting for delivery). Before ordering I toyed with the idea of getting FW800 drives.
Your timing indicates a rate of about 24MB/sec. From my last Xbench scores I think that is roughly the speed of the 5400RPM drive in the 15" Al PB. It could be that the PB is maxing out at that speed. FW400 could push up to about 40MB/sec (in theory).
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But here's where I'm confused - the copy time was the same whether I used the Firewire 800 cable, or the 400. Both came out at exactly the same time. (copying from a G4 15" Powerbook with 5400rpm drive)
Your timing indicates a rate of about 24MB/sec. From my last Xbench scores I think that is roughly the speed of the 5400RPM drive in the 15" Al PB. It could be that the PB is maxing out at that speed. FW400 could push up to about 40MB/sec (in theory).
800 is desirable, but it isn't why the new drive is faster.