[rotuts]

I plan to get the new Intel "G6" when it come out.
as it looks like it will onnly have 2 HD's ill have to have an external set.

I have 4 250MB ata in my G4.

are there FW800 enclosures that will handle SATA drives? its my understanding that ata drives are slower that the FW800 bus so if you use those drives might as well stick with ATA,

what are the throughputs for this situation?

thanks

rotuts

[mduell]

Busses on paper: FW800 is 100MBps, ATA is 100MBps or 133MBps, SATA is 150MBps or 300MBps

In practice: FW800 tops out around 80-90MBps, the 250GB ATA drives are ~60MBps*, fastest SATA drives are ~90MBps

Note about Firewire: Since no drive is Firewire native, the translation from ATA/SATA to Firewire causes some overhead; I've never seen a single drive FW800 device push >60MBps; the 80-90MBps benchmarks are using enclosures with multiple drives. (link) Also the latency is typically higher with FW drives.

So if you're going to put more than one ATA drive on a FW800 bus (which you are likely to do, since I doubt the Mac Pro will have 4 FW800 busses), then Firewire will present a bottleneck.

I'd buy a 750GB SATA drive and eSATA enclosure; I think the Mac Pro will have an eSATA port, and if not you can add some via a PCIe card for under $100. The amount you'll spend just on good FW800<->ATA enclosures would probably come close to the price of 750GB eSATA. Using eSATA provides maximum performance (throughput and latency) and makes adding drives cheap (eSATA enclosures are ~$25, FW800 enclosures are ~$100).

* There may be some faster ATA drives, but it's hard to find benchmarks for them, since the performance enthusiasts tend to only care about SATA

[rotuts]

mduell

thanks for this info. this is usefull and new to me. I currently have multiple ATA HD that i connect via FW400 enclosure one at a time.

my goal is to do the same thing with the new MacPro, have multiple (?)SATA or ATA drives through some enclose that would be the fastest at a rasonable cost.

Ill try to look up eSATA as im unfamiliar with it.

cheers

rotuts

[mduell]

Fastest at a reasonable price is definately going to be SATA/eSATA.

Once the Mac Pro is launched, send me a private message to remind me to come back to this thread.