on 1/19/04 5:15 PM, Drew Beckett at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>> With nothing technical to back it up, I would venture to say the throughput >> speed of Firewire 400 does not take advantage of the 7200 RPM IDE drives >> that are typically used in Firewire drives. > > That's not entirely true. I know of no drives that come anywhere near the > maximum theoretical speed of the protocol they use. The best 7200RPM drive I > have used has a real speed in my PC of around 54MB/sec (Western Digital > Special > Edition 160GB w/ 8MB cache), while IEEE1394 has a maximum theoretical speed of > 400MB/sec for Firewire 400 and 800MB/sec for Firewire 800. Most of today's > parallel ATA hard drives conform to either the ATA100 or ATA133 specification, > the maximum theoretical bus speed listed in their names (100MB/sec and > 133MB/sec IEEE1394 has a maximum theoretical speed of 400Mb/second (megabits per second, not MB, or megabytes/second), which translates to 50MB/second. In your example above, Firewire 400 could not take advantage of your Western Digital's full potential, which is why they developed FW800 (well, that and the fact they had to try and outdo USB2). That small "b" has caused a huge amount of confusion as just about every other HD-related spec uses MB. Of course, it worked to FW device manufacturers' favor early on as many people (including myself) thought that FW400 had this outrageously huge throughput. Still, it's a great protocol because it's hot swappable and you don't have to diddle around with ID#s, master/slave configurations, etc. -- Gregg -- SuperMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | Service & Replacement Parts [EMAIL PROTECTED] | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> SuperMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/supermacs/list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/supermacs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
