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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Firewire 3200

Very cool!
But I'm still waiting for wireless firewire that they promised in the last spec.
 
So does this mean I should stop thinking about eSATA?

BTW, what is the bandwidth of a SATA internal harddrive? 4.8GB sounds great, but if it's faster than your system can write to your harddrive.... hehe.
 
Oh, you mean, converting to firewire essentially burdens your CPU, while staying on SATA/eSATA requires no processing? Is that correct?
 
I don't believe it really burdens your cpu, just that if you can go out eSATA from your system to an external SATA drive, your throughput will be more consistent and faster.

Essentially, transfering through a FW800 port at a max speed of around 100MB/s is slower than an eSATA port at a max of 300MB/s. Also, from what I gather, eSATA data transfer is at a more consistent rate compared to Firewire and far more than compared to USB, giving you an overall more reliable transfer.
 
It's best to do straight eSATA. Any kind of intermediary increases the possibility of data corruption not to mention you're more likely to hit a wall on how much it will copy over before telling you to go screw yourself. Faster FireWire sounds nice but it's completely worthless since most of the (theoretical) bandwidth is inaccessible.
 
I don't mean to be a pill, but there seems to be some misunderstanding about how data is transferred between devices here.

This idea of SATA->Firewire->SATA is a false dilemma. The data coming off an external Firewire device never goes through some conversion back into a SATA signal again (SATA is not a 'native language' or the like). The Firewire bus is not tied to your machine's SATA bus; both are tied to the data bus separately. They are unrelated signals and do not intersect until they hit the data bus, at which point they are both, intrinsically, the same thing: a stream of data. And each has a controller which is the intermediary between the bus and the devices.

Otherwise, what ingramworks said is pretty accurate (but with a caveat that Firewire 'could' be as consistent, but likely will not be for various reasons. USB indeed being the least consistent).

ingramworks said:
I don't believe it really burdens your cpu, just that if you can go out eSATA from your system to an external SATA drive, your throughput will be more consistent and faster.

Essentially, transfering through a FW800 port at a max speed of around 100MB/s is slower than an eSATA port at a max of 300MB/s. Also, from what I gather, eSATA data transfer is at a more consistent rate compared to Firewire and far more than compared to USB, giving you an overall more reliable transfer.
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