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sbc · May 14, 2004, 01:50 PM

I was curious if HDD speed made any difference if connecting via a firewire enclosure?

CatOne · May 14, 2004, 04:57 PM

Originally posted by sbc:
I was curious if HDD speed made any difference if connecting via a firewire enclosure?

Yes, it does.

The fastest 3.5" (powered) drives can saturate 400 Mbit Firewire. At least they can in bursts. Typical transfer rates on 7200 RPM drives are around 40 MB/sec (some can go up to 50 MB/sec). So Firewire 400 will limit the max throughput a bit.

Smaller drives (the 2.5" bus powered devices) are slower. The 4200 RPM drives probably can do 20 MB/sec sustained. The 7200 RPM ones are faster (though still not as fast as the 3.5" 7200 drives, I'll bet). As such, your speed will be limited by the drive, rather than FW400.

Now if it's Firewire 800, you will ALWAYS be limited by the speed of the drive, unless you get an enclosure that has drives in a RAID 0 configuration of some sort.

tooki · May 18, 2004, 02:44 AM

The drive's rotational speed has, above all, an effect on the access time of the drive, and that is something that helps everyday usage tremendously, largely regardless of the speed of the interface.

tooki