Poor Firewire performance in Mac Pro
I've got a Mac Pro w/dual quad-core 3.0GHz Xeons and two 750-gig hard drives. One of the tasks I use this workstation for is image creation and deployment. I have the drives partitioned so I have both Tiger client and server partitions. If I'm deploying a large number of Macs, I'll boot into the server partition and deploy via multicast ASR. However, if I'm doing just a couple, I may do them via Firewire--but here's where it gets weird.
If I use an external Firewire drive (I have both 40GB Lacie FW drives and 250GB Western Digital FW drives), boot to a 10.4 partition on the external drive with one of the [to-be-imaged] Macs, and re-image the internal HD, I get very quick restore times.
However, if I simply boot the [to-be-imaged] Mac into FW Target Mode, connect it to the Mac Pro, and then re-image the Mac, it takes 2-3 times LONGER vs. the external FW drives. This doesn't make sense to me. Considering this is a top-tier Mac Pro, I expected re-imaging times to be equal or faster than the external FW drives. Has anyone seen this odd behavior? Does anyone know why Firewire performance on the Mac Pro is FAR SLOWER?
If I use an external Firewire drive (I have both 40GB Lacie FW drives and 250GB Western Digital FW drives), boot to a 10.4 partition on the external drive with one of the [to-be-imaged] Macs, and re-image the internal HD, I get very quick restore times.
However, if I simply boot the [to-be-imaged] Mac into FW Target Mode, connect it to the Mac Pro, and then re-image the Mac, it takes 2-3 times LONGER vs. the external FW drives. This doesn't make sense to me. Considering this is a top-tier Mac Pro, I expected re-imaging times to be equal or faster than the external FW drives. Has anyone seen this odd behavior? Does anyone know why Firewire performance on the Mac Pro is FAR SLOWER?
Comments