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Anyone experiencing slow firewire speeds? (external hard drive problem)

post #1 of 4
4/5/06 at 10:07pm
Thread Starter 
From everything I've read, the general consensus on firewire vs USB2 seemed to favor firewire being faster, despite USB2's theoretical claim of 480MB/s vs 400MB/s for firewire.

However, I've just bought an adaptec ACS-200 combo enclosure and a Seagate 300GB hard drive to put in it and USB2 smokes firewire. I'm getting 19.55MB/s using USB2 and only 11.48 MB/s using firewire. To obtain these results, I'm simply copying files over in Windows Explorer and timing the result. Does this seem normal to you guys? I've search and all I've come up with are dead ends.

Can people using external hard drives with their 9300 or similar laptops post your speeds. I'd be interested in your results even if you only use USB2.

I'm almost ready to return the enclosure and buy the USB2 only version for $20 less, but I want to make sure this isn't a fixable problem first.
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post #2 of 4
4/7/06 at 4:31am
I always liked FW over USB....less CPU and faster in my experience. I can play games over a FW drive similar to the internal one, but the USB hangs now and then when it accesses the drive. Usually no big deal, but it can be a pain and could potentially really piss you off when you are online.

Are those burst rates or something over the long haul? If they are small files, you might want to try a 1-2GB file and look at the rates in the beginning, middle and as it is finishing up. I remember reading that USBs initial burst can be faster, but FW wins in the long haul--plus doesn't tax the CPU as much.

Open task manager and check CPU usage as you do the transfers. They *should* show more CPU useage when you use the USB transfer.

For $20 I would definately keep the FW option. You might want it later on when you change computers.
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post #3 of 4
4/7/06 at 9:43am
You can produce more in-depth results using a program like sisoft sandra.
I found that my external SATA drive has a very high read speed (nearly double that of the internal drive), but a very slow write speedd (about half that of the internal drive). I am not quite sure why. Maybe you will find something similar with your 1394 drive.
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post #4 of 4
4/8/06 at 9:09pm
Thread Starter 
I dug a little deeper and it turns out the chipset on this enclosure is what's holding it back. Genesys isn't that well regarded. It's a shame too because I like its appearance but I'm getting way slower speeds on both USB2 and firewire than I should be. Other people are getting over 30 MB/s easy on their Cypress and Oxford based enclosures.
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