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Running OSX off internal sata or external firewire 7200?

post #1 of 5
8/22/06 at 11:14pm
Thread Starter 
so whats better? i have an enclosure with a 200gb 7200 HD in it. the enclosure is FW capable. with the exception of the firewire being limited to 400mb/s, would it be faster than the internal 60gb 5400 HD sata?

i used xbench to do a little test (yes i know, xbench is sucky)

final score for internal 45ish
final score for external 65ish

anyone do this kinda stuff with their macs?
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post #2 of 5
8/23/06 at 12:59am
I wonder what score you'd get with a 7200 for the internal.
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post #3 of 5
8/23/06 at 1:04am
What you posted is the exact reason why getting an external 7200 or RAID array is so popular over FW800 for audio and video work. It allows you to do much more than the internal 5400, not only because of throughput but because you also arent competing for disk access with other software and programs.

Now ideally depending on what you are doing you wont notice to much of a difference, because hopefully most of the OS and software will be loaded into RAM, and not in virtual memory on the HD. So enough RAM you wont notice to much of a difference probably as most software isnt as hard drive instensive as multimedia editing is, where you are streaming straight off the HD because you dont have enough RAM to preload it all.

Seablade
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post #4 of 5
8/23/06 at 10:49am
Thread Starter 
so i really wont notice a difference then right?

theoretically though, the fw on the macbook should be slower than that of the internal sata?
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post #5 of 5
8/23/06 at 9:54pm
Theoretically yes, though the HD is slower than both in data transfer which is why a faster HD makes a difference.

I cant remember the numbers right off hand though to post them.

But for general use you wont notice to much of a difference, will there be some? Yea, but not enough for most people to worry about unless they are dealing with programs that are extremely HD intensive as mentioned before.

If I remember right Mac OS uses its memory better than Windows and as such loads more into memory than windows does. Windows tends to page things in and out of VM a bit more I believe. As such as long as you have the memory to support it, it shoudlnt be an issue. Though if you are finding your memory typically fairly full, you might notice more of a difference, but you would be better off increasing your memory in that case

Seablade
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