USB Hi-Speed vs FireWire 400 external drive write speed comparison

Since there were a host of external hard drive questions, I thought I'd just try out my own speed test while I'm watching TV in the background.
The drives I used were a bus-powered 250 GB LaCie Little Disk USB Hi-Speed + FireWire 400, and an adapter-powered 320 GB Western Digital MyBook Home USB Hi-Speed + FireWire 400 + eSATA. I judged the speed by running Activity Monitor and checking for Disk Activity's Data written/sec. There didn't appear to be much else happening, so I thought that the average rate was an accurate indicator. I plugged them directly into my MacBook's ports (no hubs or daisy-chaining).
_LaCie Little Disk (using the USB power-sharing cable made no difference - I tried both):_
USB: 23-25 MB/sec.
FW400: 32-33 MB/sec
_Western Digital MyBook Home (7200 RPM):_
USB: steady 27 MB/sec
FW400: 32-33 MB/sec
So definitely FireWire won out, although I wasn't getting the same speeds as advertised. WD doesn't specify anything other than the interface's raw speed, and of course those are never achieved for bulk transfers due to negotiations, overhead, etc. LaCie advertises up to 41 MB/sec for FW400 and up to 34 MB/sec for USB.
I found it a little bit strange that the LaCie drive was a bit slower with USB than the WD drive, but that could have to do with the particular chipset used.
I was going to post the product page of the two drives I used, but I had one thread deleted because I posted a product webpage link without using it to answer a direct question.

Oso Grande wrote:
I love Firewire but what has really pushed it out of the home/prosumer market is the TON of cheap USB 2.0 drives available.
I just pulled out my WD Passport Essential 160 GB drive with the original FAT32 format. I'm getting about 15-19 MB/sec although that was on my second try. The first try was only 12-14 MB/sec. Strange. I thought it would have been faster. I'm wondering if FAT32 makes a difference. Reads were at about 32-35 MB/sec, although there was a huge spike at the start before settling down to about 33 MB/sec.
I forgot to mention that both drives in my first test were HFS+ formatted. The LaCie drive used Apple Partition Mapping as a backup for two PowerPC Mac backup partition and an additional swap space. The WD MyBook Home used GUID Partition Mapping. Let me give reads a try.

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I need more storage capacity so I am planning to get 1 Tetra La Cie - this model. I have had excellent experiences with LaCie.
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My music library is housed on an external hard drive so Time Machine can't be used since it requires an operating system on the source files...
That's not true. You can back up files and folders on an external drive using Time Machine, as long as they are not on the same volume as the Time Machine archive. You just go to System Preferences +Time Machine+ pane. Click on the Options button. All external drives are on the +Do not back up+ list by default. Remove the external drive (with your iTunes files) from this list of things excluded from backup.
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perhaps the beach ball I often get when working with iTunes is a product of the speed of the data being accessed on the external hard drive.
My +iTunes Music+ folder is on an FireWire 400 external drive. I do not notice any issues with iTunes accessing the files. That drive is attached directly to the iMac's port with no daisy-chaining behind it. If the free space gets low, the files and remaining free space will get more fragmented, and that can also cause such issues.

Are (some) external firewire 400 hard drives just cased sata drives?

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I have no idea if they are or not, it just crossed my mind at one point.

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Is it OK to use USB 2.0 connection for Glyph external drive and Mac Pro as project drive?

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If you have a mac pro, why not stick the external HDD inside via one of your many SATA cables & have it run 9 times faster than your USB?
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Macally firewire 400 external HD - Duplicated connection id.

I recently bought 3 firewire 400 external HD. My G5 has 2 400 firewire ports. There is not problem connecting disk 1 and 2, in a daisy chain to any of the 2 ports or each disk independently to each port. Same thing is true for disks 2 and 3. But when I tried to have the three disks simultaneously the system automatically disconnect disk 1 and 3. In summary disk 1 and 3 can not be connected simultaneously.
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Hi-
As DaddyPaycheck has advised, daisy chaining isn't really a good idea. Reports of drive problems, lost/corrupt data, due to daisy chaining, aren't hard to find, Mac or PC......
There are noted instances of external drive makers housings that will not support over two drives (total) in the chain.
Using disk utility I realized that there is something called connection ID for each disk and disk 1 and 3 both have the same id.
The report of bus location of the external housing controller to the I/O controller of the system is how the BSD (operating system) assigns a name (actually an address). Each device should have a unique ID. This is not something that one can manually assign; you cannot change it.
Could it be the reason for the problem?
The problem you are experiencing could indicate a conflict between the drive housing controllers and/or firmware version. It could be a malfunction of a controller, as well.
I would follow the excellent advice received, and get a FW card or hub before some important data is trashed.
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Which will run quicker or better? Internal or Fire-wire 400? (I’m a typical Mac user – lots of internet, quite a lot of iPhoto, a bit of iMovie here and a bit of Dreamweaver there)
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A 7200 RPM internal will be the fastest. But Firewire-400 will be pretty good, too, especially if it is a 3.5-inch model.
Assuming the current internal has no problems, you could reformat it and make it the boot drive, but keep all your data on a firewire external.
Generally drives start noticeably slowing down once more than 50% full; so if you can keep the internal (boot) drive under 50%, it might surprise you with how fast it could be.

Best (Reliable for the Price) Firewire 400 External Hard Drive for iMac G5?

Howdy,
I have an iMac G5 2.0 GHz (non iSight) running OS 10.4.4. I am looking for an external hard drive with around 250 GB in capacity with a Firewire 400 connection.
I am looking at the Lacie FA Porsche 250 GB, Lacie d2 250 GB and the Maxtor One Touch II 300 GB.
I have read reviews and it is a mixed bag; FA Porsche gets hot and all three don't mount at times.
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Anyone with an iMac G5 have success with a different external hard drive than mentioned here?
Anyone have any intel on the new Maxtor OneTouch III?
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Chuck

I have heard mixed things about all those drives, but I suppose that will be the case with anything. Someone always gets a good one while others gets a bad one - LOL!
I have used drives from OWC for my Mac and PC for a while now and never had a mounting issue with them under either platform. I never have had to update firmware or drivers either when I updated the OS. Nice drives and not bad prices either.
You can save a little money by buying their enclosures and adding your own ATA drive to it. There are some great deals out there on bare drives from lots of places, and these kits are very easy to assemble.

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I have been using the firewire 400 connection of my macbook (2 ghz Intel Core Duo, OS X 10.4.11) with a LaCie 320 GB 7200 RPM with no trouble for over a year now. Suddenly, the drive is really slow to mount. Sometimes only one of the 2 partitions mount (which never happened before). And it takes considerably longer to access files, let alone load one up.
I tried the external drive with the same fw 400 connection on a G4 running 10.3.9 and a PC running XP and both mounted fine (with, as expected, only the windows compatible partition loading in the latter case). Data was quickly accessed and loaded on both machines.
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Hi George,
Have you had a look in the system.log file in the Console application? It sometimes a good start to check to see if its reporting any errors when you plug the drive in. Note the exact time that you plug in the drive. This will make it easier to find the part of the log you should be looking at.
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I recently had the logic board and left i/o board replaced on my MBP, I'm not sure if this is relevant since the drive has worked since the replacements and I get the same results on other Macs.
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who makes the drive set up?
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EZ Quest Firewire 400 ext drive works in 10.4 (PPC) but won't mount in 10.6 (Intel)

I have an EZ Quest external FireWire 400 drive. Was working fine on my MDD Mac running OS X 10.4.11. NOW, when I hook it up to my iMac running OS X 10.6.8, it will not mount. Tried different ports. Tried device on and off at boot. Doesn't show up on desktop or in sidebar of finder window or in System Profiler. Drive powers up, but won't mount. Please help. Thanks. Dennis

I have the same problem. Two different EZQuest Quad interface drives suddenly won't mount on my 2010 iMac (Core Duo) via the firewire 800 or 400 ports. If I use a USB cable, both drives mount as normal, but I need the Firewire 800 ports to stream audio samples for Logic.
Both of these drives were working fine for over a year until I upgraded recently to 10.6.8 on the iMac and then tried to use one of the drives yesterday with a new 2012 MacBook Pro (10.7.4). The drive mounted once on the MacBook Pro, then disappeared and now will not mount on either the MacBook Pro or my iMac.
I tried resetting the PRAM and SMC on the iMac, but the drives still won't mount via firewire. The fact that both EZQuest drives still mount via USB indicates this is a firewire problem particular to Mac OS 10.6.8 and 10.7 rather than an external drive problem. It also seems that many people are experiencing this regardless of the external drive brand. Does anybody know how to fix this?

-10810 Finder error with FW 400 external drive

I have an external drive with USB 2 and FW 400 connections. For years I've used it without any problems with the USB connection. Recently I've connected it using FW 400 and have repeatedly had the following problem:
I am using files on an external drive (Mac OS Extended, Journaled) with a FW 400 connection when suddenly both the application I'm using and the Finder hang. I pick Force Quit from the Apple menu and in the list the app and the Finder both show up as not responding. I can force quit the app at that point but when I try to force relaunch the Finder it kills the finder rather than relaunching it. If I try to launch it from the Dock I get an error saying "The application Finder can't be opened -10810." After about 5 minutes I get an error message saying that I'd improperly disconnected my FW drive without ejecting it first (even though I neither ejected it nor disconnected it). At that point, the Finder relaunches and everything seems fine, though the FW drive (still plugged in and turned on) is now gone and doesn't appear in Disk Utility. If I unplug and turn off the FW drive and then plug it in again and turn it on again it will mount. Then the app that I was originally using relaunches on its own. At that point I can quit everything, eject everything, and restart without difficulty. Disk Utility finds nothing wrong with the external drive.
Any idea what's going on and how to fix it?
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Firewire 800 is fully backwards compatible with Firewire 400. You need a "bilingual" firewire cable or adapter to plug the Firewire 400 drive in your Firewire 800 port.

MBP firewire 400, external HD issues...

Hi all.
My MacBook Pro has given me nothing but trouble since I bought it this summer. The firewire ports have gone dead twice -- AND I have had four external hard drives die on me (and I've always ejected them before unplugging/powering down).
Often drives that will mount on other computers will not mount on this computer. And just now, I had one drive that I managed to mount through the fw800 port with a firewire 400/800 cable -- but my computer froze up during a restart -- the fan started whirring like it was going to shake the computer apart. I forced the computer to restart (again) and now my external HD's firewire ports are dead (to two different computers I tried). Fortunately it also has a USB2 port.
The Apple store has attempted to fix my computer on a few different occasions -- and with only limited success. That is, they got my firewire port to work for a couple of weeks.
Anyone else having issues like this? I am convinced there is something electrical going on in this particular computer that is frying ports both in the computer and in external HDs, but am having trouble convincing Apple of this.
Suggestions?
Thanks,
Todd

hmm ya thats not right, i would go back or call apple and try to get it fixed/replaced.
something has to have a short or something wrong with it. i think i remember someone saying that their SMC has to get swapped when they had the same or a similar issue but i cant say for sure
-matt
Message was edited by: mattathayde

Firewire 400 external device on an MacBoook Pro Firewire 800

I have an external Hard drive a generic 120GB hard drive with a standard Firewire 400 port. I used it as an HFS drive with periodic backups to and from my old Powerbook G4 10.4 before the logic board died. Drive worked 1 month prior to the Powerbook's death.
I purchased a new Macbook i5 10.6.4, a much needed upgrade. Since it has a Firewire 800 port I purchased a 400 to 800 adapter from an online retailer. Once I plugged in the new firewire addapter the drive showed up as expected as a /Volume/Backup112.ZF. However the beach-ball of death showed and I could not read the drive. Terminal I could cd to the volume, but not list. In Terminal Testdisk application (Mentioned later) was able to list disk information as well as diskutil. The firewire would not unmount cleanly. Pulling out the connector only gave a message that drive was not unmounted cleanly and remained mounted... sudo diskutil unmount /Volume/Backup112.ZF did not work. Kill and restart of Finder only crashed the computer. Computer works great and after a hard reboot.
Multiple tries to get a error log got me nowhere. I could post disk information, but that would only show that the drive has read but not write permissions.. I did find multiple postings about using a 10.5 OFirewireSerialBusProtocolTransport.kext. I do not have a 10.5 disk to get the file off to download. http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2136580
There seems to be an indication that Apple knows about the problem? Is there a developers forum where I could read what they are saying on the fix? I have an apple One Account, would it help to get in touch with the advanced staff? I have not seen any firewire problems like this in Unix. Are there any Unix people out there well versed in Firewire? Otherwise, Looks like I will be doing more research...
FYI:
NTFS read/write without software install. This works perfectly in 10.5-10.6 without any issues for my Windows to Mac drive. Too many people make it more difficult then it needs to be. To figure it out, just needed to know Unix.
1. NTFS auto-load read and write enable
sudo mv /sbin/mount_ntfs /sbin/mount_ntfs.orig
vi /sbin/mount_ntfs
#!/bin/sh
/sbin/mount_ntfs.orig -o rw "$@"
sudo chmod 755 mount_ntfs*
sudo chown root:wheel mount_ntfs*
2. NTFS boot sector fix
TestDisk from http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk.

Well, at least I know that everything SHOULD be working as it did briefly this evening. I'm at a dead end . . .can't think of anything else to try.
Guess I'll just have to pick up another adapter tomorrow and see if that helps.

Firewire and external drive

I bought an additional hard drive. I daisy chained it to existing external hard drive which is connect to my mac via firewire. My mac now doesn't see either drive. If I plug original external to USB my mac finds. How can I get my mac to find my external drive again via firewire? Thanks.

If your FireWire drive is one that has USB and FireWire interfaces, you can't connect another drive on a different type of bus than the one used to connect to the host computer. If I'm reading what you're saying, it sounds like the new drive is USB and you're trying to daisy-chain that with the FW drive. Not going to work.
-Douggo

USB Hi-Speed vs FireWire 400 external drive write speed comparison

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