Barry -Laptop offloading - didn't get doubletime

L

Lenilenapi

Carbonite Member
Barry, I tried the laptop offloading trick and didn't get doubletime. Both of my downloads just slowed down to half time.
What am i doing differently?

15" Powerbook, 1.5MHz Processor, 1 Gig RAM, new 250 GIG firewire 400 drive (7200 Seagate w/OWC enclosure) 60 GIG 5400 drive internal.

BTW I used a new topic because your other post got hijacked by other subjects.
 
I don't know -- all I know is I did it on my Dell Inspiron 9300, and copying just to the internal drive, or copying simultaneously to the internal and the external drive, both took about the same amount of time.
 
Barry,

What Hard Drive you you have in your 9300? I have a Hitacthi 60GB 7,200RPM.

I tried transfering a card to a FW Drive and a USB Drive! It seemed to be a tad slower but nothing to worry about.
 
I've got a 100mb 5200rpm drive in the Dell. And yes, it does seem a little slower to copy to the two drives, but like maybe 10% slower, not 50%. It takes about four minutes for copying to just the one drive, and maybe 4:30 to copy to both -- I didn't run the stopwatch on it, but that's a seat-of-the-pants guess.
 
Sorry guys, what's the trick, just copy and paste to both drives simultaneously?
 
There's no trick, it's just that the card's read speed is fast enough to support copying to two drives at once.

So drag the folder to your internal drive, and then open another explorer window and drag the same folder to an external drive. On my system there's barely any slowdown, it finishes both copies in about the same amount of time as it takes to copy to just the internal drive.
 
Probably. The point is that the bottleneck in the system isn't the card's read speed, it's the drive's write speed. So when copying to the internal hard disk, which usually runs at only maybe 20mB/sec, the card's sitting there with a lot of unused read speed capacity -- at 80mB/sec, I figured hey, maybe it could support writing to a second drive too. And it turns out it could.

Now, two FW800 drives -- probably. Depends on bus saturation etc. I think you're safer to be writing to two different busses, to avoid congestion, but FW800 is supposed to support 100 megabytes per second, so there should be plenty of bandwidth.
 
Hi all:

Interesting results. I have been trying some experiments doing the same thing on my PB G4 1.67Ghz. So far, the best I have found is to set up a RAID 1 using the OSX raid utility. Doing this, I got about the same results as Barry did, perhaps a 10 to 20% decrease in speed to write to two drives.

We tried using on of these mirrored drives on our PC AVIDs through using Mac Drive and the PC AVIDs did not recognize the mirrored drive ;-( I then ran the same speed test as described above using two LaCie 250 gig externals. The results, hooking up one drive via USB 2.0 and one via FW 400 were dismal, it more than doubled the single drive time, took about 25 minutes to download one card to both drives.

So since I need dual drive redundancy for this sitcom shoot, I guess I will be laying off the cards to a single drive, then cloning the drive for safety at the end of the day. Bummer. If we were on-lining on Mac AVIDs rather than PC AVIDs, the RAID 1 would have been the perfect solution.

Best,

Dan
 
Dan, What were you using for the mirrored raid?
Was it two separate drives, or a single enclosure that held two drives?
Do you use only one firewire connector to the laptop or one for each drive? 800 or 400?
And finally and most importantly, have you tried using the raid to capture the footage directly through the Final Cut Pro Log & Capture window ("Capture Now")?
That sounds like it could be a great workflow if the Raid is fast enough.
I don't have a raid so I can't test it myself. I keep watching the boards to see if someone has tried it.
 
I get faster transfers from my 700m than from my 1.5ghz PB... The internal firewire on ALL Macs is a little dicey...even my QUAD... something to do with the bus and allocation.



ash =o)
 
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