[cagljevic]

I currently run a C2D MPB 17" and enjoy the performance it brings with my current configuration, but I know I could boost it even more with an external raid solution. Anyone here have experience with using their MPB (CD or C2D) with external fw800/sata raid? I have 2 74GB raptors that I would like to put to use as my boot drive/applications drive and use the internal 100GB 7200rpm hitachi as simple storage. At the moment I use my fw800 port for an external 750GB drive so I would need to use my expresscard/34 for a dual port fw800 or dual port sata to use raid. I'm curious to know what others have tried and their experience.

Mark

[mduell]

A single Raptor can just about saturate FW800, and your FW800 port is already used, so I think it's a no-brainer to go with eSATA.

[cagljevic]

Thanks for the input. I am not so certain that a single raptor would fill the fw800 bandwidth based on tests I have read online and from using them in my windows box that i had built previously, but 2 would certainly fill it up.

I suppose a better question to ask would be, does the software raid built into OS X have a noticeable performance hit compared to a hardware solution? I realized right now there aren't any mac supported hardware sata expresscard/34 adapters available, but there are fw800 enclosures that do the hardware raid. Just curious if there could be a benefit to using fw800 over sata in this instance.

Mark

[mduell]

FW800 has a maximum bandwidth of about 79MBps; StorageReview's benchmark puts the Raptor at about 72MBps. That's pretty much saturation in my book.

I don't know how good or bad OSX's software RAID implementation is.

There are a couple eSATA ExpressCards available for the MBP.

FW800 is going to limit you to ~79MBps (with higher latency due to the bridge chip), while SATA will let you go at least that fast, and probably faster.

[CaptainHaddock]

eSATA is somewhat faster than FW800, isn't it? But FW800 is a nice protocol, good for chaining, video capture, and other stuff.

Now, I did read a discussion thread from 2006 on FW800 ExpressCards at Apple Discussions, and the concensus seemed to be that the available cards are so bad as to be unusable. Make sure you do your homework and get something that has satisfied users, and buy from retailers that will allow returns.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by CaptainHaddock 

eSATA is somewhat faster than FW800, isn't it?

Where by "somewhat" you mean 1.9-3.8 times faster (150MBps or 300MBps vs 79MBps).

[Simon]

FW800 would have been a very nice bus if Apple had spread it quickly to all Macs as a replacement for FW400 (it is backward compatible to FW400) and licensed it for less. Instead they were greedy and chose to market it as some kind of 'pro' interface. The result is that hardly anybody adopted it and people still use USB for mass storage.

eSATA is here to stay. It's not only faster, but also more elegant because you pay less bridge penalty (native disk support) than when attaching a SATA HDD to a FW interface. Too bad Apple screwed up on FW. There are two interesting articles (here and here) on the topic written by James Wiebe, the founder of WiebeTech (and they're not exactly an enemy of FW).