External firewire 400 drives vs int sata

R

Reflex Films

Active member
here is something i should probably know - but dont!

i have just bought a new mac pro -

compared to my old g5 power mac - its smashing it on render times / encodes / real time performance in motion.

as i edit in dvcprohd- i have always used external firewire 400 drives

i had to get a 400 to 800 converter cable just to attach the external fw 400 drives to the new mac pro - it doesnt have the old fw 400 connectors

so to my question:

what sort of performance variation will i get from

old fire wire 400
vs
fire wire 800 drives

vs the internal satas and the mac pro

and where will i see the benefit of this performance variation while editing (during renders ? ) and exporting ?
 
I get 105 MB/s write/read with a single Seagate 7200.11 internal SATA drive (ST3500630AS).

Firewire 400/800 doesn't come close to that on my MacPro.
 
David S. said:
I get 105 MB/s write/read with a single Seagate 7200.11 internal SATA drive (ST3500630AS).

Firewire 400/800 doesn't come close to that on my MacPro.
Click to expand...

Internal Hard Drive will always write faster than an external since it is directly connected to the motherboard. Now the problem with writing to the internal HD is because your os and everything else is being written to it as well.

From my understandings with computers you would want an E sata connection external which would be very close to the speeds of your internal drive and much faster than a firewire connection.
 
Cieloent said:
Internal Hard Drive will always write faster than an external since it is directly connected to the motherboard. Now the problem with writing to the internal HD is because your os and everything else is being written to it as well.

From my understandings with computers you would want an E sata connection external which would be very close to the speeds of your internal drive and much faster than a firewire connection.
Click to expand...

Which is why the Mac Pro's have 3 extra drive bays, besides the system drive.
You can add extra internal drives which do NOT have the os and everything
else being written to it, and as I understand it THAT is what you really want
to do.....
 
Exactly- only the system HD is doing the OS stuff, the 3 other internal bays are perfect for your video projects. This is a big part of what makes a desktop machine more expandable and powerful than a laptop.

Noah
 
Cieloent said:
Internal Hard Drive will always write faster than an external since it is directly connected to the motherboard. Now the problem with writing to the internal HD is because your os and everything else is being written to it as well.

From my understandings with computers you would want an E sata connection external which would be very close to the speeds of your internal drive and much faster than a firewire connection.
Click to expand...

The drives I mentioned are dedicated internal media drives, not my boot drive.

I thought that is what the OP asked.

BTW, my boot drive, which is a WD, also reads and writes at 105 MB/s.

But, no -- never capture to a boot/app drive.

BTW, when I soft RAID/Stripe two of those drives, my data rate jumps to nearly 200 MB/s
 
i was merely asking about the diff between externals vs internal satas - no way would i ever use the os drive as the scratch disk also.

Thanks for the feedback on drive speeds - ok - so where do these speeds make themselves a benefit in the editing process - it cant be during renders - surely that is a ram / graphics card / processor related issue ?

is it basically just faster write out to things like saving a self contained qucktime movie to a drive ?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top