Which connection? A mini review of Firewire 400, 800 and USB

[mercury_in_flames]

Well I bought myself a lacie tripple interface D2 extreme 160gb external hdd about a year ago, and have been through all the different connections. Just recently i bought a 3 port firewire 800 pci card. Pricey, and I only have 1 device with firewire800, but the drive seems and is ALOT faster. I;ve clocked a transfer of 4gb in around 2 minutes flat with firewire 800.

here are my findings;

Firewire 800 v Firewire 500; a nice 10mb/s faster average read speed

Firewire 800 v USB2; erm...

Firewire 400 v USB2;

Hope you guys found this interesting.

[Richard]

This is definitely interesting. I am in the market for another external hardrive for mobile use and would like to go for an external SATA II drive with a PCMCIA adaptor (something like this )- you know much about these Greg? - Or anyone else for that matter.

[mercury_in_flames]

looks pretty cool. heres an external with sata interface;

http://www.lacie.com/uk/products/product.htm?pid=10571

I;ve been really impressed with my lacie d2 so thats why im reccomending a lacie one here.

You can im sure get a case for a sata hdd and just use that pcimcia card though. Obviously if you do that, you will get the full warranty instead of just a 1 year that you get with regular electronic devices.

Im not sure you will find a 'mobile' one i.e one thats tiny with a relatively small amount of space. I can take a snap shot of my 160gb lacie. You can take the base stand off so its just one square brick. It isnt really portable unless you are using a backpack or briefcase.

A word of warning rich; what hard disk does your laptop that you plan to use the pcimcia card have??? If it is a 5000rpm hard disk the speed of the interface will be severly hindered by the speed of the laptops hard disk.

[raintheory]

I've actually thought about rack-mounting my LaCie 500gb. They sell rack ears for them. My rack serves as a laptop stand anyway (aside from housing our MDS-E10 Pro, MOTU 828 MKII, etc) and I use the LaCie for all of my music production anyway.

[Richard]

What I'm looking for Greg is a fairly large capacity with, small footprint and fairly fast. It's going to be used almost exclusively for running VPC images for demo's.

A friend of mine has a similar external drive that he picked up in Japan. Basically an enclosure with power supply and sata cables / pcmcia interface with a sata drive mounted inside.

It will be used with a couple of different laptops - one has an internal sata drive already the other an ata-100 - both at 5400rpm.

[mercury_in_flames]

hmm, if you like i can do a benchmark test of my lacie using firewire 400 on my laptop then compare that with my desktops firewire 400 just to give you an idea of what you might be in for?

[pata2001]

Yeah, eSATA is the way to go. More and more motherboards are having eSATA port, albeit most only have 1 port. Don't have to worry about CPU overhead anymore like USB. I just hope optical drive manufactures wakes up and make more SATA optical drives.