External Firewire HardDrives, Faster than Internal?

Biohazzard56 · 2004-04-18, 10:03 PM

I want to buy an External Firewire HardDrive so I can record in fraps without any loss but I think firewire is faster than an internal harddrive does anyone happen to have any numbers and stats?

Electrofreak · 2004-04-19, 10:11 AM

no, but I hear external SCUSI (or however u spell it) are hella fast...

Biohazzard56 · 2004-04-19, 05:10 PM

Im pretty sure Firewire is faster than ATA 133.

NoSurrender · 2004-04-20, 09:35 PM

i've never heard that. I think it'd be slower, (no memory recently) external has always been shown to be slower and alot more expensive.

Rbstr · 2004-04-20, 09:40 PM

Yeah get yourself an internal WD caviar Drive

DemiInuyoukai · 2004-04-20, 11:26 PM

make sure whatever drve u get, that it is serial ata, cause SATA is slightly faster then scusi and at least 7200 rpm, they don't cost that much

Electrofreak · 2004-04-21, 11:16 AM

no, scsi will is faster than a SATA drive but costs significantly more.

Marsman · 2004-04-21, 12:15 PM

SCSI or Small Computer Serial Interface - was used in servers for a long time because of the a few reasons - once was the number of drives that could be handled (up to 7 per chain) - often capacity and RPM was higher than IDE drives as well - however, in recent years, IDE has caught up to SCSI in regard to capacity, transfer rate and RPM so the difference is much less. The biggest reason SCSI was used for servers however was not any of the reasons mentioned so far, but it's ability to stack access commands. SCSI interface can buffer disk requests from multiple users on a server and prioritize the requests based upon their position on the drive for more efficent access making them ideal for server based applications. With a single user PC - this advantage is unnecessary and with the higher costs involved with SCSI and the need for a seperate interface, SCSI was not the choice for user PC's

Firewire or IEEE 1394 (originally at 400 M/s) is much faster than USB 1 (1 M/s) and USB 2 (480 M/s) may beat it, but an 800 M/s version of firewire is now available. SCSI's Ultra320 is now the fastest interface for that side, but SATA actually performs better even at 150 M/s. Considering the internal IDE max out at 133 M/s, firewire externals may appear to give good competition against internal HD's. This is not the case however. In looking over some benchmarks from Tom's Hardware it would appear that the max transfer rate is a dismal 40 M/s or less. Despite the high interface transfer rate, performance of external drives just don't hold up compared to internal systems which achieve up to 150 M/s (see this article at Tom's )

So stick with a nice fast internal HD with SATA if possible for the fastest performance. If you really want speed, go with a raid array, but external's are not a good choice for this application.

Electrofreak · 2004-04-21, 02:41 PM

A SATA @ 150 M/s is faster than a SCSI Ultra320?! Heh. I've heard many claims to the otherwise... then again I've never used SCSI (tho I do have a SATA) so I can't say from personal experience.

Marsman · 2004-04-21, 04:02 PM

Originally Posted by Electrofreak

A SATA @ 150 M/s is faster than a SCSI Ultra320?! Heh. I've heard many claims to the otherwise... then again I've never used SCSI (tho I do have a SATA) so I can't say from personal experience.

Yeah, surprising huh? Take a look at some RAID tests here with SCSI Ultra 320 against some SATA systems. As you can see, despite that the interface is burst capable of 320 M/s - they don't even come close to approaching that figure in average throughput even under a RAID configuration, where as the SATA array was capable of much higher RAID throughput exceeding its single drive limit of 150 M/s as one would expect from a RAID setup. In single drive systems, it may be much closer, but SCSI's days are limited as the highspeed champ. Get a 10,000 RPM SATA HD if you want some serious write ability for capture.

Rbstr · 2004-04-21, 04:14 PM

The Raptor Driver WD make beat alot of Scsi in alot of beanches especialy the ones that matter for PC users/gamers

Electrofreak · 2004-04-21, 09:20 PM

Actually I've been thinkin about gettin 2 Raptors and RAIDing them but it would be so much $$ and I'm saving up for my contribution to the "S4V3 T3H P5U" fund

I might just go and get another Seagate 7200 RPM 80 gig SATA, but I'd have to wipe all my current data on this drive (20 gigs or so), which I dunno if i wanna do...

edit- oh and Mars, I found the article very informative, and quite surprising. I figured SCSI with its 320 meg burst mode would pwn a SATA with only 150. I stand corrected.