More notably, single-drive eSATA performance is constrained by the Express Card interface. Read speeds for eSATA as shown below are 4-5MB/sec higher for eSATA when using an enclosure like the FirmTek SeriTek/2SEN2: there is no “bridge card” involved, only a straight pass through to the hard drive’s interface.
External drive for mac firewire pro#
The picture changes here: Firewire 800 performance on the MacBook Pro is slightly improved over the Mac Pro (Firewire 800 performance varies widely by Mac model), and eSATA is not as fast running through the “single lane” Express Card slot (as compared to the Mac Pro’s Sonnet E4P 4-lane PCI-Express card). The FirmTek SeriTek/2SM2-E was used in the Express Card slot (it has two ports). Even on the slowest part of the hard drive, eSATA still matches Firewire 800 performance!ĭisktester run-area-test -c 1M -t 512M -i 5 sg1_5 Higher is better (MB/sec) MacBook Pro eSATA vs Firewire 800Ī 2007-vintage 2.4GHz MacBook Pro was used for this test. While the Firewire 800 connection provides adequate performance for some uses (eg a boot drive in a multi-drive system), the performance difference is stark: you wouldn’t want Firewire 800 to be used for your Photoshop scratch disk or any other disk-intensive task. See the Recommended Equipment and Photoshop Conclusions pages for hardware recommendations. For eSATA, a Sonnet E4P PCI-Express card was used for the eSATA connection. The test drive was daisy-chained to that enclosure for the Firewire 800 test. The 3.0GHz quad-core (2006) Mac Pro used for this test was booted off its own external Firewire 800 boot drive. Some of them have Firewire 800, but the new MacBook has only Firewire 400. The eSATA option is the only high-performance hard drive solution available (with some variants), so stick to these two systems if you think you might need fast hard drive performance.ĭead-end systems for performance-oriented expansion include the MacBook, iMac, MacMini. The only Mac systems that can use eSATA are the Mac Pro (via a PCI-Express card) and the MacBook Pro (via an ExpressCard). The lighting-fast Seagate 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 was used for the test.ĭiskTester was used to test both configurations. The only difference was the cable connecting the Voyager to the Mac Pro. The Voyager has eSATA, Firewire 800/400 and USB 2.0 ports, allowing the same drive in the same enclosure to be tested.
It uses a “bridge card”, and is a bit slower than an eSATA-only enclosure about 5MB/sec for reads, and perhaps 1-2MB/sec for writes. But the alternative-external SATA or eSATA-eclipses the performance of Firewire 800, even for a single drive, forgetting a striped RAID, where the gap would grow far larger.įor this test, the NewerTech Voyager was used. It also ostensibly offers good performance. Send Feedback Related: eSATA, hard drive, laptop, Mac Pro, MacBook, MacBook Pro, optimization, Photoshop, storage, USBįirewire 800 offers convenience: a built-in port on most Macs.
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