[LosJackal]

My co-worker just received his new 1 GHz PowerMac, complete with Firewire 800. I've been looking forward to the new Firewire 800 enclosures, so decided to buy the $50 Belkin FW800 cable to start running some benchmarks.

Putting my 17" PowerBook into target disk mode and mounting it on his computer, I copied a 1.78 GB movie from the PowerBook over both Firewire 400 and Firewire 800.

Over Firewire 400 it took 2 minutes 13 seconds, which by my calculations is 13 MB/sec or 109 Mbps.

Over Firewire 800 it took 1 minute 44 seconds, which is 17 MB/sec or 140 Mbps.

This is pretty slow if you ask me (not even close to 400 Mbps), and the increase due to Firewire 800 is only 28%, though not terrible I guess.

Can anyone venture any explanations? I'd have to say the read speed of my internal Fujitsu MHS2060AT is the bottleneck. If so, you'd think that Firewire 800 would show no improvement if Firewire 400 isn't getting saturdated.


I'm sure the write speed back to the 2.5" drive would have been slower still, and I can't yet predict how the numbers will look hooking up a Firewire 800 enclosure with 3.5" 200GB Western Digital Special Edition, which is what I ultimately plan to do.

Thoughts?

[seanyepez]

The notebook hard drive is the bottleneck. The fastest notebook hard drives transfer a maximum of 300 megabits per second. While you did notice an improvement, you won't see FireWire 800 won't shine next to FireWire 400 unless you use a faster hard drive. The increase in performance can be attributed to the fact that FireWire connections don't always transfer at their theoretical maximum because of controller overhead. FireWire 400's bottleneck was reached, but 300 megabits per second is a far cry from FireWire 800's maximum transfer speed.

[LosJackal]

Originally posted by seanyepez:
The notebook hard drive is the bottleneck. The fastest notebook hard drives transfer a maximum of 300 megabits per second. While you did notice an improvement, you won't see FireWire 800 won't shine next to FireWire 400 unless you use a faster hard drive. The increase in performance can be attributed to the fact that FireWire connections don't always transfer at their theoretical maximum because of controller overhead. FireWire 400's bottleneck was reached, but 300 megabits per second is a far cry from FireWire 800's maximum transfer speed.

I'm sorry, then I still don't understand how I saw a performance improvement then going to Firewire 800, if the internal PowerBook hard drive is indeed the bottleneck.

I mean, given these PowerBooks don't even come with 5400 rpm drives, do you think Firewire 800 in a laptop is silly? If you were me, would you just stick with Firewire 400? I mean, I just spent $50 on a Belkin FW800 cable! Who knows how much more expensive FW800 enclosures will be. Is it worth it to you?

[CheesePuff]

Originally posted by LosJackal:

I mean, given these PowerBooks don't even come with 5400 rpm drives, do you think Firewire 800 in a laptop is silly? If you were me, would you just stick with Firewire 400? I mean, I just spent $50 on a Belkin FW800 cable! Who knows how much more expensive FW800 enclosures will be. Is it worth it to you?

The new 4200 RPM hard drives that are in the PowerBook G4 12.1" through 17"ers are faster then the previous 5400 RPM drives that Apple used in the 667 and 800 MHz DVI models.

[BkueKanoodle]

Just to give you a comparison although not a necessarily scientific on the difference between a laptop and a desktop hard drive, heres my scenario.

I have a 40 gb toshiba laptop hard drive in a ADS pyro 1394 2.5 enclosure

I also have a 60 gig IBM Deskstar 7200 rpm desktop drive in a 5.25 ADS pyro 1394 enclosure.

I have the same VPC OS file on each drive. Each OS is in a suspended state.

To start the VPC off the 2.5 drive, it takes 9 secs to resume

Starting of the 5.25 its takes 4 seconds.

Saving the machine state back to the disks also is noticably faster on the Desktop firewre drive.The VPC performance is also noticebly faster.

My point is even with firewire 400 their is a noticable difference between desktop and notebook drives. I can only speculate on the performacne of a fw 800 enclosure, especiialy if you put a realy good drive in there, like one of the IBM's with an 8 mb cache

[nobitacu]

Nice.... that's all I can say hehehe

Ming

[seanyepez]

Originally posted by LosJackal:
I'm sorry, then I still don't understand how I saw a performance improvement then going to Firewire 800, if the internal PowerBook hard drive is indeed the bottleneck.

I mean, given these PowerBooks don't even come with 5400 rpm drives, do you think Firewire 800 in a laptop is silly? If you were me, would you just stick with Firewire 400? I mean, I just spent $50 on a Belkin FW800 cable! Who knows how much more expensive FW800 enclosures will be. Is it worth it to you?

Interfaces don't always transfer at their maximum theoretical throughput.

[LosJackal]

Originally posted by seanyepez:
Interfaces don't always transfer at their maximum theoretical throughput.

Okay. I did read that in your original message a couple of times. Here's my beef though.

What I think you are saying with that statement is that I shouldn't expect Firewire 400 to transfer at 400 Mbps. Agreed, I don't have that expectation. So would you say that 109 Mbps is the actual FW400 maximum throughput in this case? Or is it your initial statement that the drive is the bottleneck, meaning 109 Mbps is the drive's maximum?

Cause if it's the drive's maximum, I don't see how plugging in a Firewire 800 cable suddenly makes the drive go at 140 Mbps. Shall we then say that 140 Mbps is the actual FW800 maximum??

[gururafiki]

Originally posted by LosJackal:
Okay. I did read that in your original message a couple of times. Here's my beef though.

What I think you are saying with that statement is that I shouldn't expect Firewire 400 to transfer at 400 Mbps. Agreed, I don't have that expectation. So would you say that 109 Mbps is the actual FW400 maximum throughput in this case? Or is it your initial statement that the drive is the bottleneck, meaning 109 Mbps is the drive's maximum?

Cause if it's the drive's maximum, I don't see how plugging in a Firewire 800 cable suddenly makes the drive go at 140 Mbps. Shall we then say that 140 Mbps is the actual FW800 maximum??

This is a question I had. I mean, isn't it silly to have a firewire 800 port if your hardrive can't even write that fast? Can the 17" powerbooks harddrive copy at 800 mbs, because if so then maybe the only benefit of FW800 is a device that can write data at 800mbs.

When I hooked up my old iMac DV to my new powerbook via firwire, it took an hour to copy 13 gigs of data. This seemed slow for FW400!

[CheesePuff]

If my math is correct (which is probably isn't), you should be able to copy about 170 GB of data over FireWire 400 in one hour. But then again that is at 400 mbps, and it would never transfer that fast.

[Eug]

If my math is correct (which is probably isn't), you should be able to copy about 170 GB of data over FireWire 400 in one hour. But then again that is at 400 mbps, and it would never transfer that fast.

You are correct. Just multiply that number by about 2/3rds and you've got a more accurate real-life speed in ideal conditions.

Over Firewire 400 it took 2 minutes 13 seconds, which by my calculations is 13 MB/sec or 109 Mbps.

Over Firewire 800 it took 1 minute 44 seconds, which is 17 MB/sec or 140 Mbps.

Hmmm..., IIRC my external Firewire 400 laptop drive has real-world speeds faster than your Firewire 800 test speeds. However, that's testing with non-fragmented drives and a smaller file (few hundred MB).

[Wet Jimmy]

I was under the impression that the benefit of FW800 was more along the lines of increased READ speed - the benefit as far as WRITE speed is negligible...

[bradoesch]

Originally posted by Wet Jimmy:
I was under the impression that the benefit of FW800 was more along the lines of increased READ speed - the benefit as far as WRITE speed is negligible...

What do you mean by this? FireWire goes the same speed in either direction.

[catalystC]

Data throughoutput is increased, but the limiting factor is still the hard drive.

[Leonard]

Originally posted by gururafiki:
This is a question I had. I mean, isn't it silly to have a firewire 800 port if your hardrive can't even write that fast? Can the 17" powerbooks harddrive copy at 800 mbs, because if so then maybe the only benefit of FW800 is a device that can write data at 800mbs.

When I hooked up my old iMac DV to my new powerbook via firwire, it took an hour to copy 13 gigs of data. This seemed slow for FW400!

Firewire 800 is probably designed more for use in desktops with RAID arrays of SCSI drives.

Might be useful on a laptop if you can make a RAID array of firewire HDs.

[Wet Jimmy]

Originally posted by bradoesch:
What do you mean by this? FireWire goes the same speed in either direction.

You can read from a drive much faster than you can write to it - FW400 seems to max out occasionally when reading from fast drives, but FW800's extra bandwidth alleviates this problem. The bandwidth of the cable can't change the speed to which the drive writes, though.

At anyrate, that's what the early tests that I've seen seem to suggest - You won't notice much change in writing speeds (depending on the drive, of course) but you will notice an increase in read speed.

[mcs37]

Originally posted by gururafiki:
This is a question I had. I mean, isn't it silly to have a firewire 800 port if your hardrive can't even write that fast?

Agreed, I find the FireWire 800 to be quite useless on the PB right now, especially since your hard drive can't nearly keep up with it. What else would you need it for? Watching high-speed webcam footage, but never recording it at that speed? Apple really should have installed USB 2.0 instead to keep up with EVERY other machine that's being released now. It's hard to find a machine that has 1.1 rather than 2.0 anymore, but Apple instead went for FW800. Poor form, Apple, poor form. The lack of USB 2.0 really turned me away from the PowerBook for now. I plan to use my PB intensely for 3 years, and I am sure I'll buy something USB 2.0 in that time, but my PB wouldn't be ready for it.

Therefore I will continue to hold off on the 17" for 1 year until my college graduation, when I can pray for a 17" PB with (single|dual) 970 PPC, USB 2.0, 100 GB, 1 GB standard RAM, HDTV tuner built-in.

Mike

[parsec_kadets]

Originally posted by mcs37:
Agreed, I find the FireWire 800 to be quite useless on the PB right now, especially since your hard drive can't nearly keep up with it. What else would you need it for? Watching high-speed webcam footage, but never recording it at that speed? Apple really should have installed USB 2.0 instead to keep up with EVERY other machine that's being released now. It's hard to find a machine that has 1.1 rather than 2.0 anymore, but Apple instead went for FW800. Poor form, Apple, poor form. The lack of USB 2.0 really turned me away from the PowerBook for now. I plan to use my PB intensely for 3 years, and I am sure I'll buy something USB 2.0 in that time, but my PB wouldn't be ready for it.

Therefore I will continue to hold off on the 17" for 1 year until my college graduation, when I can pray for a 17" PB with (single|dual) 970 PPC, USB 2.0, 100 GB, 1 GB standard RAM, HDTV tuner built-in.

Mike

If you really think it's that important, you could always buy a USB 2 PC card. I saw them at Best Buy for $50; I wouldn't be surprised if they were less online.

[k2director]

I don't think it was a mistake for Apple to include Firewire 800 on the new 17". You'll see appreciable advantages when you attach a dedicated Firewire 800 drive, or RAID. It's a pro port, for pro applications, and it belongs on the Powerbooks. A lot of video people will appreciate the port over time....

[mrmister]

...but it is ridiculous that they don't have USB2 yet.

" I'm sorry, then I still don't understand how I saw a performance improvement then going to Firewire 800, if the internal PowerBook hard drive is indeed the bottleneck."

It is possible that with the FW400 the transfer rate was the bottleneck, and now with FW800 it is the drive that is the bottleneck. I am looking forward to real benchmarks getting done.

"I mean, given these PowerBooks don't even come with 5400 rpm drives, do you think Firewire 800 in a laptop is silly?"

As others have said, the current HDs in the laptops are actually faster at read/write than the last generation of 5400 rpm drives that the PBs shipped with.

[Thinine]

Target disk mode isn't that fast, either. It's faster to transfer files over 100BaseT ethernet than target disk mode.

[LosJackal]

Originally posted by Thinine:
Target disk mode isn't that fast, either. It's faster to transfer files over 100BaseT ethernet than target disk mode.

Thank you, that's what I was about to suggest. Perhaps there is no substitute for the Oxford 911/922 bridge, which would explain why Eug's 400 speeds are faster than my 800.

So I have a 200 GB hard drive ready to go into a FW800 enclosure. Just can't buy one yet! It seems the LaCie d2 drives will be the first on the street in a week or two.

[scottiB]

This is not a FireWire-only issue. My ATA-133 RAID card does not push my data @ 133 MB/second. The ATA-33 drive on my iMac/266 doesn't transfer at 33MB/sec.

These specs, I believe, are theoretical and established for engineering (I'm not a hardware engineer) parameters to be submitted to IEEE or some such board.

[Eug]

Originally posted by LosJackal:
Thank you, that's what I was about to suggest. Perhaps there is no substitute for the Oxford 911/922 bridge, which would explain why Eug's 400 speeds are faster than my 800.

Actually, what I was trying to suggest was that your machines' drives might be fragmented.

I did my testing with a completely empty external hard drive (Toshiba 60 GB 4200 rpm laptop drive) and on a relatively clean separate partition of my TiBook's Fujitsu 60 GB 4200 rpm drive. (Not that it makes much difference, but it was a fresh intall of X.2 on the other partition too.)

As soon as the drives get fragmented and the data is dispersed, the speed drops dramatically.

[bradoesch]

Originally posted by Wet Jimmy:
FW400 seems to max out occasionally when reading from fast drives, but FW800's extra bandwidth alleviates this problem.

Not from a single drive, perhaps a RAID.

[Eug]

Originally posted by bradoesch:
Not from a single drive, perhaps a RAID.

There are IDE drives out there that reach 50 MB/s, which is about 25% faster than the fastest clocked Firewire 400 drive under ideal conditions.

[baglunch]

Originally posted by mcs37:
Agreed, I find the FireWire 800 to be quite useless on the PB right now, especially since your hard drive can't nearly keep up with it. What else would you need it for? Watching high-speed webcam footage, but never recording it at that speed? Apple really should have installed USB 2.0 instead to keep up with EVERY other machine that's being released now. It's hard to find a machine that has 1.1 rather than 2.0 anymore, but Apple instead went for FW800. Poor form, Apple, poor form. The lack of USB 2.0 really turned me away from the PowerBook for now. I plan to use my PB intensely for 3 years, and I am sure I'll buy something USB 2.0 in that time, but my PB wouldn't be ready for it.

Therefore I will continue to hold off on the 17" for 1 year until my college graduation, when I can pray for a 17" PB with (single|dual) 970 PPC, USB 2.0, 100 GB, 1 GB standard RAM, HDTV tuner built-in.

Mike

My initial concern about buying a powerbook was is it fast enough to edit DV? yes they are and have been.. but now they have two firewire ports with enough bandwidth not to drop frames on long captures.

Although the firewire 400 and firewire 800 ports both share the same firewire bus (the bus is firewire 800), if you connect a firewire 400 drive to the firewire 800 port using a fw400tofw800 cable, and connect your camera to the firewire 400 port, you will get very little data collisions resulting from fw bus saturation. I've been able to capture several hour-ish (26) projects from DV without dropped frames.

To me, as a video editor the addition of firewire800 was very important, not so much for the sake of having a fw800 port as theoretically fw400 is fast enough by itself, but more the 800mbps bus that would be shared by the dual firewire ports (400/800). It's easier for two fat people to run down a wide hallway than a narrow one (no offense to the obese).

[Eug]

Originally posted by LosJackal:
Over Firewire 400 it took 2 minutes 13 seconds, which by my calculations is 13 MB/sec or 109 Mbps.

Over Firewire 800 it took 1 minute 44 seconds, which is 17 MB/sec or 140 Mbps.

This is pretty slow if you ask me (not even close to 400 Mbps), and the increase due to Firewire 800 is only 28%, though not terrible I guess.

Finally got around to testing this using Firewire 400 with an HFS+ laptop drive, but independent of a Mac. I have MacDrive loaded on my PC. (Last time I tested it I found MacDrive laptop drive transfer speeds in Windows were in the same ballpark as speeds on a TiBook, but I couldn't remember the actual values.)

Copied two full DVDs - from my Cutie Firewire 400 enclosure using a Toshiba 60 GB 4200 rpm laptop drive, to my PC desktop 7200 rpm drive.

Approx 8943 MB (8.73 GB) was transferred in 7 min 2 seconds (422 s) = 21.2 MB/s (170 Mbps).

I betcha it would be a bit faster with completely clean drives, and significantly faster with two desktop drives.

[bradoesch]

Originally posted by Eug:
There are IDE drives out there that reach 50 MB/s, which is about 25% faster than the fastest clocked Firewire 400 drive under ideal conditions.

50 MB/s sustained or burst? Which drives can do this?

[hsvgoku]

Hi guys. It just come to my attention coming across this thread. The HDD speed in the PB now is 4200rpm. So i can change it to a higher rpm HDD ie. 5400 rpm right? So is this notebook hdd the same as the one used on the PC laptop or they are different? Is there a faster HDD for the PB other than the 5400rpm ones ?

[Eug]

Double post.

[Eug]

Originally posted by bradoesch:
50 MB/s sustained or burst? Which drives can do this?

Sustained, at the outer tracks. The Western Digital WD2000 is an example:

Originally posted by hsvgoku:
Hi guys. It just come to my attention coming across this thread. The HDD speed in the PB now is 4200rpm. So i can change it to a higher rpm HDD ie. 5400 rpm right? So is this notebook hdd the same as the one used on the PC laptop or they are different? Is there a faster HDD for the PB other than the 5400rpm ones ?

Some 5400 rpm drives are faster (esp. the 8-16 MB cache versions), but some aren't. The newest 4200 rpm drives are quite fast.

7200 rpm laptop drives are also coming.

[rustyclockwork]

7200rpm laptop drives....

I do hope they come with intercoolers and their own exhaust system.... if my little 12" gets any hotter than it already does...

:-)


Who was talking about firewire and dropped frames during capture? I thought that "dropped frames" went the way of the dodo when the analog to digital firewire bridge (found in most dv camcorders now) came out.

I love my apples... I used to work on 100,000 dollar Sony Edit Stations back in 98, and my little G4 dual 800 blows those things out of the water. Firewire eliminated those super expensive SCSI arrays (needed for the speed requirements to capture analog) and now I can simply do all this stuff, near the pro quality on a machine under three grand.

Jason