Transfer Speed- USB2 vs. FW400 vs. FW800

I'm looking to get a 2nd external drive for my G5 2Gdual (2006). Like most people, I want the fastest I can get. But only within a budget. I'll be doing video work (Fianl Cut), Sound recording (using ProTools LE), and backups.
I've read that USB2 can have burst speeds of 480Mbps. While Firewire 400 has a sustained of 400 Mbps. I'm assuming that Firewire 800 can have sustained rates of 800 Mbps.
1) Are these rates for read and write? (for each)
2) When they say "burst", how much data are we talking about?
3) Can I expect these nominal rates with my G5?

Those were some informative links. It looks like I
may be checking into getting a FW800 (ieee 1394b)
drive(s). I've found some links to PCIe boards on
another thread. Until I start researching them
further, they all look very similar.
barefeats.com should serve you well in this regard.
If I can't find out if the chip set is the Oxford 92#
on a drive box, how much difference might one see in
a lesser chip set?
Dunno if there even is another bridge chip for Firewire 800. I've seen very bad performance with some non-Oxford 911 Firewire 400 bridges though. I dunno what the sarotech enclosure uses that I linked to, but it's certainly as fast as expected.
I think OWC do list the chip inside their enclosures (probably all Oxford 9##).
I've noticed that the drive housings I've seen
pictured on several sites have (2) 1394b jacks on
them (including the Maxtor One Touch II I currently
have). Is this for daisy-chaining drives?
Yup.
If so how
many and what would be the impact on transfer rates?
*Searching Apple's support pages for "Firewire FAQ*
Ah yeah, here we go: Firewire FAQ
Daisy chaining shouldn't have much of an impact when a single drive is transfering data at a time.
With multiple drives transfering data simultaneously I'd expect transfer rates to drop accordingly - as a single drive doesn't max out Firewire 800, I'd expect performance of two such drives in a daisychain to run faster than at half their normal speed, but slower than half of what FW800 can do (100 MB/s, dunno if there's some overhead).

Similar Messages

External firewire hard drive reverts to slower transfer speeds

This is the strangest hardware problem I've come across. I'm running a unibody mbp (June 2009) with an external WD 2.0TB Caviar Green drive mounted in a firewire 800 enclosure made by icydock.
Lately, I've noticed that after an unknown amount of uptime, the speed of file transfers to the WD external drive slows down dramatically. I figured this out by watching my time machine transfers take a bit longer after awhile, and I verified this using aja system test and speedutilities.
When I boot my mbp in the morning, file transfers and time machine backups to the external WD transfer at a rate of about 67-75MB/s. This is the speed the drive should always be working at since it's connected via firewire 800. Aja speedtest verifies the speed is as it should be as well.
Then, after a couple hours of using my mbp, or even later in the day, I'll transfer a file to the external WD or run a time machine backup and find that the transfer will only run at a max of 29-35MB/s. This is exactly half the speed the transfer should be going at. Subsequent transfers stay at this slower rate no matter what I do.
However, I've been able to fix this problem by unmounting and remounting the external WD or restarting my mbp. After doing either of these actions, the WD external goes back to contant transfers at 75-80Mbs. So something is happening where the longer the mbp is running, or after some sort of disk activity, the external WD reverts to a slower transfer speed (closer to FW400). I can't isolate whether it's an issue on the mac os side or the hard drive or the hard drive enclosure because I can make the hard drive go back to optimal speed again merely by unmounting and remounting it. This works consistently until a few hours later when the drive begins to handle transfers at half speed again.
I run hourly time machine backups to the drive. The time machine backups can't be the culprit because the drive remains running at optimal speed after the backups (verified with aja system test and speed utilities)
Any possible ideas as to why the drive cuts down to half its optimal transfer rate after a bit of time? I can't figure out the cause of this, and the consistency of the drop leads me to think this is an issue with the power management on the drive since it reverts to full fw800 speed when I umount and remount the drive or restart my computer. Could this be an OSX issue where for some reason the system isn't negotiating the fastest speed?
Any help appreciated.

From the SoftRAID manual:
Fire hubs and disk drives. FireWire hubs are notorious for introducing errors and instability onto the bus.
Make sure that all of your consumer electronic devices (iSight, cameras, scanners) are connected to a separate FW bus. These devices are not built to the same standards as storage devices and known for introducing errors onto a FW bus.
Cables. While most cables work fine with a single device, many cables will introduce errors when 2 or more disks are connected to the bus.
http://www.softraid.com
http://www.softraid.com/demo.html - manual and demo
Output can be to any drive or partition. When you lauch iMovie it asks where to store your project.
I just bought a camera, and curious myself to see if I can take 10 minute clips and use iMovie/iDVD so that it will auto-play. I may end up buying Pogue's "iMovie Missing Manual" or something.
iMovie Discussions

Very slow transfer speeds with external hard drives through Firewire and US

Hi All,
My external drives transfer very slowly on my MacPro. I've been searching for answers and have turned up very little. Apple support suggested I post my issue here. Just to make a note, I measured my disk speeds with both AJA System Test and copying files between drives and reading the Disk Activity in Activity Monitor.
I have 3 external drives, all MyBook Premium or Professional, 1x 500GB, 1x 1TB and 2x 1TB in RAID 0. I had them on Firewire 400 and the RAID 0 2TB one on Firewire 800. My transfers on FW were all around 24MB/sec on all drives (much less than what I should be getting with FW400). I then read somewhere that the FW bus on the MacPro uses the slowest speed connected for all FW connections. So I unplugged everything but the FW800 Raid 0 drive and my transfer rate jumped to 40-60MB/sec. This is much better, but still about half or so of what I expect it should be producing from an external RAID 0 setup.
To keep my FW800 backup drive faster, I've plugged the other two into USB2.0. The transfer speeds on both drives are now hideous, around 10-15MB/sec. This is so slow, but I'm not sure what to try to fix my speeds.
The HD's in the external drives are all 7200rpm, and all should be transferring at a higher rate. Do you have any suggestions or ideas? Ideally I'd like to get everything transferring at rates they should be transferring at, but I'll settle with my current FW800 speed of 40-60MB/sec if I can get my other two drives transferring at a non-snail pace.
Is this a common issue? I can't believe I'm the only one plugging multiple external hard drives into their Mac Pro. I hope someone has a fix or solution for this. I'm all ears!
Thanks in advance.

Hi Kappy, thanks for the information.
So I rejigged my setup a tad. My RAID 0 is still FW800, the second drive is back on FW400 on the back port, and the third is USB 2.0 on the back as well.
It's interesting to note that I saw the FW800 taking a bandwidth hit if the FW400 drives was being read/written to. For example, if I was averaging 50-60MB/sec on the FW800 drives and copy something large to the FW400 drive, each drive averages out to about 30/MB second, roughly half the FW800 speed I was getting. The USB while the slowest didn't cause any slowness on the FW drives.
Here are my Xbench results. These results are from each drive being benchmarked individually with no other drives being tested at the same time.
*MyBook 2TB in a RAID 0 configuration: Firewire 800*
Results 75.42
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.5 (9F33)
Physical RAM 16384 MB
Model MacPro3,1
Drive Type WD My Book
Disk Test 75.42
Sequential 80.92
Uncached Write 69.16 42.46 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 110.79 62.68 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 53.66 15.70 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 136.76 68.73 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 70.62
Uncached Write 36.38 3.85 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 140.55 45.00 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 93.26 0.66 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 88.38 16.40 MB/sec [256K blocks]
*MyBook 1TB on Firewire 400*
Results 47.73
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.5 (9F33)
Physical RAM 16384 MB
Model MacPro3,1
Drive Type WD My Book
Disk Test 47.73
Sequential 52.47
Uncached Write 48.45 29.74 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 53.76 30.42 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 43.69 12.79 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 70.91 35.64 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 43.78
Uncached Write 17.29 1.83 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 98.83 31.64 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 76.33 0.54 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 97.01 18.00 MB/sec [256K blocks]
*MyBook 500GB on USB 2.0*
Results 40.60
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.5 (9F33)
Physical RAM 16384 MB
Model MacPro3,1
Drive Type WD 5000AA External
Disk Test 40.60
Sequential 35.99
Uncached Write 37.31 22.91 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 37.22 21.06 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 26.62 7.79 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 50.27 25.27 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 46.55
Uncached Write 20.37 2.16 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 68.44 21.91 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 93.55 0.66 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 86.71 16.09 MB/sec [256K blocks]
So Kappy are you saying that those speeds look normal?
Thanks

FW400 and FW800

Hi.
Okay, so recently I got a FW400 PCMCIA card to give me a dedicated buss for running FW400 devices off of, so that I could utilise the full potential of my FW800 external hard drive on the internal buss.
But, I've noticed that, when the FW400 PCMCIA card is connected, the connection speed on my FW800 internal buss drops down to FW400 (I am checking this via the System Profiler).
I am stumped, since as far as I know, this shouldn't happen, since both busses should be independent of each other.
As soon as I power down and remove the PCMCIA card, the internal buss speed goes back up to FW800.
Does anybody have any ideas why this is happening?
Thanks,
onlyone-jc.

Yes, you'll find that here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=442212&tstart=30
It has been archived for some reason, thus no more posts can be added to it, otherwise I would have posted there instead. It seems no resolution was found either, so maybe somebody can post a resolution up in here?
Both busses (the Powerbook's internal FireWire buss, and the FireWire buss provided by the PCMCIA card) should remain independent, and thus allow the internal buss to remain open at 800Mbps transfer speeds. But, that doesn't seem to be the case here?
The only way that a FW400 device should prioritise itself over a FW800 device, would be if they were both connected to the Powerbook ports, in which are both connected to the same FireWire buss, thus meaning that they are not able to act independently of each other.
As was said in the linked thread, surely there's a way to prioritise either buss, or something similar?
Can anybody help? Are there any official Apple technicians around here? Or, somebody with the right know-how?
Thanks,
onlyone-jc.

Daisy chain fw400 and fw800 bad?

I have two lacie rugged external hds that I want to connect to my mbp. Both drives have 1 fw400, 1 fw800 and 1 usb2 connection. I was going to daisy chain the drives via fw800 and then connect one of the drives to my mbp via fw400. I was told by a reputable professional that mixing ports when daisy chaining will cause problems and prove to be unreliable. What do you guys think?
Thanks,
Dave

When chaining always have the fastest drive first (closest), otherwise it will run at the slower speed i.e. MBP - Firewire800 - Firewire400

The much debated FW400 and FW800 issue, my final verdict.

Ok, so there has been many conflicting theoretical opinions on how FW400 and FW800 work together on the Macbook Pro's. So I went ahead and conducted some tests with my Triple Interface WD Mybook Pro 500GB and M-Audio Firewire Solo using XBench 1.3
You can see the figures at http://memo.tv/mbp_fwtests.htm. (If I had used a FW800 Stripe set such as the Mybook Pro 1GB the difference in performance would probably be much bigger as the current bottle neck in some of these tests is probably the disk and not the interface).
My results indicate that:
Running the disk on its own in FW800 with no FW audio interface provides by far the best HDD performance
As soon as you connect a FW400 device, the FW800 performance drops to FW400 levels. It does not matter whether the FW400 is daisy chained off the FW800, or connected to a seperate FW400 - the disk always drops to FW400 - and for a £2K 'professional' machine that s*cks big fat donkey b*lls
Even having the disk on its own on FW400, seems better than connecting it on FW800 and having another FW400 device connected (that makes sense I guess).
I had no audio dropouts in any config while the tests were running.
Running iTunes and streaming audio (from radio) while the tests were running had no/minimal impact on test results
USB2 performance for disks are a helluva lot slower than FW400 and should be avoided if any kind of disk performance is needed.
I guess this clears up the myth that if you daisy chain a FW400 device off a FW800, the FW800 works at full bandwidth.
Now of course these are the results that I got. I don't know if I have a healthy mac or not! So I am very eager to find out how other people's mac respond to similar tests... so if you are in doubt, please go and download xbench, try a few different configs, run the Disk Test every time, and lets see the results!
cheers,
MacBook Pro C2D 17" Mac OS X (10.4.9) Week 46 Build

to be fair, not even the desktop macs come with more than one firewire buss built in. many ports, yes. but one buss. so, when you realise that your requirements will outstrip the bandwidth you can get from that one buss, you have to consider your other options. luckily for you, you have a macbook pro, which has a PCexpress card slot. this means you can actually add another _totally independent_ firewire 800 buss, via a card. you'd have to do the same thing on a mac pro tower if you needed it, just with a different kind of card.
I doubt that there are many if any laptops available that come with more than one firewire buss built-in, regardless of how many ports they put on them. so your £2K machine isn't really the ripoff that you are feeling it is.. particularly given that it has this vital expansion capability via the PCexpress slot, which will resolve your firewire issues perfectly via the addition of an inexpensive card.
you can even choose to buy an eSATA card instead of a FW800 one, and use an external drive with an eSATA connector. this will give you even faster disk performance than FW800, and still leave your built-in firewire buss free for your audio interface.
btw, one thing you should know. m-audio are notorious for bad drivers. it's quite common for users of other firewire audio interfaces (like RME for example) to have far less, or even no drop out issues at all in sharing a drive and the interface on the one buss. it's possible that it's just your m-audio device that refuses to make any effort to share the buss bandwidth with your drive. and it's also possible that your western digital drive is not a good player on mac firewire either. I recall reading somewhere about WD drives having some issues or less than optimal performance on macs.
in any case, the suggestion of using an inexpensive card to add another high speed buss to your machine will work regardless of what your devices are and how bad or good their firewire use is, cos they'll then have their own uninterrupted buss.

Transfer speed and other minor bits

First off - I love my iPod (40g Colour) and despite my regular bouts of impatience when updated, loading etc I am very happy with the thing. I even bought my wife a shuffle and she likes that for when she's at the gym. I found the software/hardware to be very forgiving.
However I thought I'd post a query to see if anybody had any ideas on my minor problems.
1) When we loaded my wife's shuffle for he first time we had problems with the USB 2 convection. PC keeps saying "this item can run faster connect to a USB2 ....." but it is connected to a USB 2 socket. Now everytime I attach either iPod the same warning comes on (except if I connect before starting!). I know its a USB 2 because a new board was fitted a while ago and my 40g will synch and charge on the connection.
2) Slow transfer. I recently loaded iTunes 5.0 which didn't work for me (see 3). So I wiped it and loaded a copy of 4.9 (thanks to filehippo). Im up and running again but had to re-synch my iPod to iTunes. The tranfer rate is about 500 tracks per hour so to do the 8500 that my iPod takes needs 17 hours. When its done I should'nt need to do it agin for a while but could I speed things up a bit?
3)Should I go to iTunes 5.0.1? 5.0 loaded on my PC fine without all teh problems that have filled these oages recently but when in 5.0 I connected either iPod (shuffle or 40G I got an error somthing like "Ipod not recognised re-intall iTunes". I know some other people had a similar problem. iTunes 4.9 is working fine but is it safe for me to try 5.0.1 yet?
Sorry to go on a bit but I know from watching these forums recently there are some very knowledgeable and helpful people out there so I hope you don't mind my request.

I've had some news - most of it good. I got fed up with the transfer speed so I took my box into my local store to get it checked out. No visible fault on my USB 2.0! I know it happens but they couldn't replicate it so I went home. Plugged all my stuff in except USB devices. Plugged in my iPod and it worked. I was now thinking about power requirements etc. Plugged in my USB modem and the iPod still updated at USB 2.0 speed. Next I tried my wife's shuffle - so far so good. I then plugged everything in and the iPod defaulted back to USB 1.1!
Tried the shuffle in the spare USB2.0 socket and it worked. Plugged my iPod in and that worked - Now I knew what the problem was - I only have 3 USB 2.0 sockets (5 USB1.1)and two had faulted.
Next step will be a new card with a fire wire socket! Happy Days - although I still cant get an extension cord to work with my iPod.
While I was on a roll I took the bull by the horns and loaded iTunes 6.0. Works like a dream although it is a bit slower than 4.9 - probably considerably bigger but it works!!
My turn to be the lucky one this week!!! Maybe your turn next.

Questionable transfer speed of Zen Stone Plus over

I'm going to make this short and sweet. Ever since I purchased this (4 days ago), every single transfer I've made via the 0cm long usb cable provided with it has been rated rather low.
USB 2.0 has a maximum potential TX speed of 60MBps, however with the miniscule cable I was provided, TX speed is no faster than .MB
ps.
I did my first TX before firmware upgrade and it was rated at .MBps, I then not long ago upgraded the firmware, but no change.
Any reason why this is such?
Btw I'm on Vista Ultimate 64bit, and the firmware version I upgraded to is .03.0
Other than this, It's all fine (except the stopwatch has choppy framing when used and while playing music at the same time, but that's another matter).Message Edited by Capt-Irrelevant on 09-07-200708:52 PM

hi there!
ih have exactly the same problem! (I also have this choppy stopwatch only while listening to a song) I think my Player is a bit slower: for ,3GB i need 40minutes....
I received my player today and searched hours in the web for a solution. I tried different ways of transfering the data, nothing worked. Every other USB2 device (Stick, HDD, Mini HDD...) works perfect!
I have a Kubuntu Li've-Boot CD (u dont have to install this OS it only boots from CD) and while using this OS i have the full transfer-speed in both directions. In Windows XP SP2 i only have the full speed while copying data from the player to my disk.
Well.... i think it's a driver/config issue cause thats the only thing that have change in the Unix system but i cant figure out what exactly cause this problem: i used different ports, changed the energy options in windows, updated chipset driver, reinstalled player, unplugged other devices. i think the players ressources are used by something else or another thing already use something that the player needs.
Tommorow i will test the player on other PCs and Unix systems and with an USB-hub.
My Mainboard: Asus A8N-SLI (AMD CPU and nforce4 Chipset) + WinXP Porf SP2
[the rest of my system isn't important i think]Message Edited by Buttermilch on 0-23-200703:38 PM

Transfer speed to Airport Disk?

I have a 300GB LaCie connected to the USB2 port on my Airport Extreme Base Station. So far, this arrangement seems to be working fine in Leopard--but I'm wondering if the data-transfer rate is abnormally slow.
I have the Wireless Radio Mode set to 802.11n (802.11b/g compatible) (unfortunately, I can't go 802.11n only, or my TiVo can't connect), and the iMac I'm on is only a few feet away from the Base Station. I'm transfering a 3.5GB iMovieHD file from the iMac to the 300GB LaCie right now, and the total transfer time is about 42 minutes. Does this seem normal?

There's a bit of confusion in this thread about speeds.
Data transfer speeds are sometimes given in MegaBITS per second Mb/s and sometimes given in MegaBYTES per second MB/s. (it's easy to get them confused)
The Airport Extreme's wireless is rated at 270Mb/s.
That number does not reflect real world use (but all manufacturers use the theoretical value) What it means is that this is the maximum number of bits per second going in both directions including all the overhead stuff.
What is the maximum real world speed? In the real world the best speed you'll see copying a file from one place to another is 10MegaBYTES per second. This is very fast wireless very similar to wired ethernet. It can only be achieved when the Airport is set to 5GHz radio mode.
The USB hard drive does not achieve this speed. The CPU in the base station struggles to cope with files systems and the drive. So reading and writing you get between 3 and 6 MegaBYTES per second. The same drive would be 4 or 5 times quicker if it were plugged into your computer.
Using a NAS is faster. But this is plenty fast enough for streaming HD videos.
Jon,
Your speed is about half the regular speed for copying. Not massively slow but slower than I'd expect.
Try connecting at 5GHz n-only.
And use the graph device in Airport Utility to see if you have a poor signal strength.

Very slow and bumpy USB3 transfer speed

Hi all,
I have a WD external usb3 hard disk and I am experiencing slow and bumpy transfer speeds as you can see from the screen shot (it starts fast but then falls down to few KB/s ...this is really frustrating):
h t t p: //s10.postimg.org/abm42k1kl/usb3_slow.jpg
If I do the same thing on my older PC with USB2 it works just fine, I mean constant speed of around 70mb/s
My Specs:
Mobo: Z97 G45 Gaming
Source hard drive: WD Caviar Black 2TB
Windows 8.1 64 with all updates
intel i5 4670k
8gb ddr3 1333
I checked to see if there is a specific usb 3 driver for Z97 chipset but I couldnt find anything. Any ideas? Or maybe it is some settings in the bios which makes this problem?
Thanks in advance for your reply!

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?DwnldID=22824
I do recommend a system restore backup just in case if anything stops working you can restore it back...

Advice pls: V.slow transfer speeds to external FW HDD ... but not always!

I've a WD MyBook Premium 320Gb external drive and I'm getting very poor transfer rates via firewire.
Most of the time I drag and drop multimedia files (mpg or avi) between Finder windows and I get transfers of around 300-350Mb/minute. However on two occasions recently the rate has increased to roughly 1Gb/minute. I can't account for why there is such a huge differential in transfer speeds in the same file type - and neither can Western Digital.
By way of comparison I get roughly 1Gb/m transfer speeds from a USB2 Sandisk flashpen to the iMac, matching the speed increase I've seen on two occasions via firewire.
So I guess the questions that arise are
1. what speeds should I get when transferring large files across firewire? I don't expect the theoretical 400mbps sustained.
2. would speeds be better using USB2?
3. what format should the external drive be and does it make a difference to performance? It's currently HFS+ Journalled though WD say that's not ideal.
Thanks
iMac Core Duo 1GB Mac OS X (10.4.7) iBook G3-800 & Airport §

I've been digging around a little more and I've found a CNET review of the most popular external drives and Seagate was worst but the MyBook wasn't too fast except for reading whereas the IOMega was the fastest for writing via firewire but not USB.
I think I'm going to have to live with the performance poor though it is for writing. Hopefully the format will improve things a little, if not it's one of the most attractive drive out there so I'll have to appreciate it for its aesthetics.

Firewire 400 Transfer Speeds Slow

I have three Western Digital My Book Studio drives hooked up via Firewire 400. As I understand it, FW400's theoretical max transfer rate is 50MB/s (400Mb/8~=50MB). However, the transfer between the drives moves along at a paltry 12MB/s.
If I hook up a single drive, or all three (daisy-chained), and transfer directly to my internal drive, the transfer speed sits at 14MB/s (internal drive is a 320GB 7200rpm Seagate drive).
When I hook up one of the My Book Studio drives via USB, the transfer speed hovers around 34.5MB/s.
When I hook up a WD Passport Elite via USB, the transfer speed stays at a constant 30MB/s.
I have updated the firmware on all of the drives, and even installed WD's special drivers. None of this has helped the speed issue.
Please help me fix the slow transfer speeds!

That test isn't likely valid, because OS X should have cached that file in memory (unless you let the file get bigger than it has RAM, in which case it may still have a good portion of it cache). Look at the Activity Monitor and you'll see that the write speed will spike way above the read speed (if it writing drive is faster than the reading one).
_Write Directly to Internal Drive: 65.95MB/s_
cat /dev/zero | dd bs=2m of=~/big_file
851443712 bytes transferred in 12.311725 secs (69157141 bytes/sec)
_Write Directly to Firewire Drive: *25.9 MB/s*_
cat /dev/zero | dd bs=2m of=/Volumes/Khazad-dum/big_file
297795584 bytes transferred in 10.953078 secs (27188301 bytes/sec)
_Read Directly from Firewire Drive: *12.58 MB/s*_
cat /Volumes/Khazad-dum/anotherbigfile | dd bs=2m of=~/anotherbigfile
317734912 bytes transferred in 24.071077 secs (13199863 bytes/sec)
_Without bs=2m: *13.5 MB/s*_
168837120 bytes transferred in 11.914134 secs (14171162 bytes/sec)

Transfer speeds for internal drive/FireWire

I have a 2 yr old PowerMac G5 with a single 160 Gb hard drive, so I have an internal drive bay available that has a 150 MBps SATA controler. Does that mean I won't get the expected speed from one of the big Seagate or Maxtor internal SATA drives with 1.5 or 3 Gbps transfer capacity?
If that's true, would I get faster transfers using an external drive via FireWire 800?
Thanks!

The maximum transfer speed of the 1.5 Gbps is actually about 1.2 Gbps (80% efficiency), or 150 MBps. So, in theory the 3 Gbps interface would be about twice as fast.
However, no single drive can achieve throughput at even the 1.2 Gbps level, so you're really not missing anything if you put in a drive with a 3 Gbps interface on it.
FW800 is 800 Mbps or 100 MBps at 100% efficiency. Real world transfer speeds would be in the 80MBps range at best. That's also a pretty tough speed to reach for a single drive. My 10,000 rpm 150GB Raptor drive can benchmark at or above that level, but many drives won't be able to.

External hard drive, error -36, corrupt files and slow transfer speeds

This is a long post but stay with me.
I've got an external 250GB Lacie drive connected to my 24" Intel iMac via Firewire 800. I have approximately 80GB worth of files (including my iPhoto library) on the Lacie that I'm trying to move over to my iMac but have run into some frustrating problems.
Overall, transfer speeds are erratic – fine at times and SUPER SLOW (5 minutes to transfer a 3MB file) at other times. At first I was transferring entire folders, but after always getting errors (error -36 to be exact), I was having to transfer individual files. This works fine as long as the files aren't too big (which makes the transfer speeds SUPER SLOW) and not corrupt (which gets me an error -36). Is my Lacie crashing on me? Is there any hope?
Here's what I've done to try and salvage my sanity with no resolve to my problems (not exactly in this order):
1) Ran Disk Utility to repair Lacie. Everything came back OK
2) Ran Disk Warrior on Lacie. Found a handful of bad items that Disk Warrior was able to repair. Had Disk Warrior replace the old directory of the Lacie with the new directory.
3) Ran Drive Genius: Raired and Rebuilt the directory, did an Integrity Check (came back OK), attempted to Defrag but could not because of errors to the drive, did a Scan for bad blocks (which after running for 3 days! it was only 20% complete and had found over 150 bad blocks, at which point I quit to try something else)
4) Checked that my Firewire cable was properly connected and replaced the older one I was using with a brand new one.
5) Disconnected all peripherals except for keyboard, mouse and Lacie.
6) And at times, even viewing a file on the Lacie has caused my Finder to crash, requiring a restart of my iMac.
I'm sure I've left something off I've tried but you get the idea.
I've read that maybe I can transfer my files using Terminal. Yes/No? Does this bypass any corruption the files may have?
What about creating a second partition on the Lacie and moving files over to the second partition? Does this solve anything? I don't know anything about partitioning so maybe I'm talking crazy.
I've also read that iPhoto tends to corrupt files which makes me hate iPhoto, and myself for not backing up.
And I've read a lot about error -36's and none of it sounds good so I'm just hoping that someone might have other suggestions for me to try and save my files (especially my iPhoto files which include baby pictures that if I lose, my wife will kill me).
So if anyone has any ideas, let me know. Please. I'll try anything.

Hi Aaron Thompson-
I am fairly certain you have a bad power supply brick to the LaCie drive. This is a hard problem to troubleshoot as generally when the bricks go bad they do so slowly and the drive appears to power up and stuff but it just doesn't work.
If the drive is under warranty LaCie will replace the brick at no charge. Otherwise they sell them for around $20US on their website.
Luck-
-DP

Problems with Photoshop performance and data transfer speed on iMac

Two months ago, I started noticing slow performances using Photoshop (above all using clone stamp tool) on my 27" iMac (late 2012). I did the AHT and I found that 8GB of 32GB RAM were broken.
I removed them but the problem didn't disappered, I also noticed that data transfer speed (both copy and paste from/to internal HD and from CF card/external HD) was really slow.
I tried many solutions suggested by Apple support, none of them worked out. At the end, I tried uninstalling and re-installing Photoshop: no more problems!!!
10 days ago, I received a new 8GB RAM module and so I installed it back... suddenly, the problem came back, I tried re-installing again Photoshop but the problem, this time, still persist!
Does anyone had the same experience? All other CC programs work well (LR, AE, Premiere...)

yes, it does!
what seems to be very strange to me is how data trasnfer speed could be affected!
(just to say, I've already tried reset of SMC and PRAM, I've tried with different accounts and I've also re-installed the OS, next step would be formatting the disk and installing the OS from zero)

Transfer Speed- USB2 vs. FW400 vs. FW800

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