Hands-On Report--eSATA vs FireWire 800 on a 15" MacBook Pro--How Fast Is It?
For external drives, FireWire 800 (or fast FireWire) has been the top data transfer protocol for large data transfers on PowerBooks using relatively inexpensive drives at a speed of up to 800Gb/sec. But Serial ATA (SATA-II) is a rapidly rising star for external drives, especially with the new connector called eSATA which promises speeds of up to 3Gb/sec, nearly four times the speed of FireWire 800. However, in the real world today's SATA-II drives can not work as fast as either protocol's theoretical limit so that raises the question, which is faster with a new SATA-II drive?
Last week, we reviewed the FirmTek SeriTek/2SM2-E, and eSATA ExpressCard 34 for the MacBook Pro's new slot and Monday we reviewed the NitroAV FireWire 800 ExpressCard 34. These two cards allow us to compare the eSATA and FireWire 800 protocols using the OWC Elite-AL Quad case and a brand new, empty 250GB 3.5" Seagate SATA-II hard drive spinning at 7200rpm and formatted with the GUID partition scheme required by Intel-based Macs.
We used three tests to measure the speed of the eSATA, FireWire 800 and FireWire 400 connections between our MacBook Pro and the SATA-II drive in the Elite-AL Pro Quad case--QuickBench 2.1.2, Xbench 1.3 and duplicating our test 500MB folder. We didn't bother with the Elite-AL Quad's slow USB2.0 connection. For comparison, we also added the results of the three tests for the MacBook Pro's internal SATA drive, a 100GB 2.5" Seagate Momentus rotating at 7200rpm, from Monday's article. Here are the results in megabytes pre second (MB/s):
| Test | Elite-AL Quad w/3.5" SATA-II Drive |
Internal Drive
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
(Higher is faster)
|
eSATA
|
FW 800
|
FW 400
|
SATA
|
| . | ||||
| QuickBench 2.1.2 Extended Test | ||||
| - Write (MB/s), Avg. of 30-100MB runs |
75
|
43
|
32
|
41
|
| - Read (MB/s), Avg. of 30-100MB runs |
72
|
74
|
38
|
38
|
| Xbench 1.3 Drive Test (256k blocks) | ||||
| - Sequential Write (MB/s) |
78
|
42
|
32
|
34
|
| - Sequential Read (MB/s) |
77
|
74
|
38
|
40
|
| - Random Write (MB/s) |
28
|
21
|
18
|
24
|
| - Random Read (MB/s) |
27
|
26
|
20
|
20
|
| Duplicate 500 MB Folder (MB/s) |
23
|
17
|
13
|
14
|
The eSATA connection is faster than FireWire 800 in almost every test. Although FireWire 800 beat eSATA in the QuickBench Read test and came very close in the Xbench 1.3 Sequential and Random Read tests, it lost handily in the three write tests and in the file duplication test.
3.5" drives are much faster than the 2.5" drives used internally in notebooks even when both use current technology and rotate at the same speed. This is borne out in that the 3.5" external drive with a regular FireWire 400 connection is about as fast as the internal drive with a SATA connection.
While eSATA is faster than FireWire 800, at least in our tests, it currently has one significant drawback. External eSATA drives cannot startup a MacBook Pro while a FireWire 800 can. Hopefully, booting a MacBook Pro from eSATA will be built into a near future update of Mac OS X 10.4.x or a firmware update as the case may be. [Bill Fox]
[Update 8/30] This article sparked much more than the usual feedback from our readers. We want to point out that the article was not meant to be a complete analysis on the two techologies, FireWire 800 vs SATA. It was meant to be focused on the 15" MacBook Pro which came without a FireWire 800 port, much to the chagrin of many PowerBook G4 owners wishing to upgrade to the Intel-based Apple 15" MacBook Pro. We have changed the title accordingly to convey this. In addition, we received comments on SATA vs FW 800 generally.
Michael Bean of the Arizona Macintosh User Group provided the broadest comments on the comparison between FireWire 800 and SATA as general data transfer protocols:
1. While the write speed of FW800 is about 40% slower with a single drive, once you configure 4 SATA hard drives in a striped RAID set on a PowerMac G5, SATA leaves FW800 in the dust with the same configuration. In fact, FW800 is a very slow interface for striped RAID use vs PCI-X or PCIe SATA host adapters with multiple hard drives.
2. FW800 requires an expensive bridge for each enclosure. SATA interfaces do not have this issue.
3. FW firmware is constantly evolving which has caused some enclosures to no longer work properly when daisy chained and at worst some hard drives have been corrupted by FW800 code changes.
4. SATA hard drives are bootable on several host adapters. For the PowerMac G5 PCI and PCI-X users the FirmTek SeriTek/1eVE4 Host Adapter provides 4 bootable ports (reference) and the FirmTek SeriTek/ 1VE2+2 provides 2 internal and 2 external bootable ports (reference). For PCIe users the FirmTek SeriTek/2SE2-E two port PCIe SATA host adapter provides two bootable ports. SATA hard drives can provide great turbo boot
capability when matched with a bootable FirmTek SATA host adapter.5. FW800 has never been the "top data transfer protocol". Direct IDE and SATA connections have always beat it for speed. USB 2.0 is the most common external hard drive interface. In the computer industry there are 10x more SATA enclosures sold than FW800. As soon as external SATA ports are added as a standard option to Apple computers, there will be very little reason to purchase FW800 enclosures.
[Bill Fox]
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