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TICKET ARCHIVE -> Difference Between Firewire 400 And 800
Naveenkhan - May 18, 2005 - 9:04 pm
I would like to know what is the difference between Firewire400 and firewire800 ports on G%. If this is a pointer to the the throughput the port can handle then can the Firewire 800 be able to capture the UNCOMPRESSED directly without the aid of RAID and STRIPING of multiple drives.
I wish to also place on records that this forum has a bank of the best professionals and to respond promptly to the queries of the amateurs. Thanks for all this and have a good day.
I wish to also place on records that this forum has a bank of the best professionals and to respond promptly to the queries of the amateurs. Thanks for all this and have a good day.
Drumhum - May 19, 2005 - 7:48 am
Hi Naveen,
As you guessed, the difference between FW400 and FW800 is the speed at which the port works. FW800 is roughly 800Mb/s (mega bits not bytes!)
As to the question of whether you can capture uncompressed video, the answer is "sort of" but "not really".
take firewire 400 for example. there is no drive I am aware of that can run at that speed. The actual hard disks are usually ide types running through a "bridge" to convert them to firewire400. My point being that the 400 and 800 numbers refer to the interface type, not the speed of the drive itself.
To capture uncompressed you will need your drives to be quite happy at handling data rates of 25MB/s or so. fw400 drives are rated faster than this so in theory they should be up to the task, let alone fw800. In practice the drives become much less efficient once they start getting loaded with data. The video editing process is very demanding too, requiring the drives to work much faster than the capture process.
To handle uncompressed video reliably you need very fast robust storage. Its not good if the drive is being pushed close to its limit. For this reason SCSI really is the order of the day. Super fast SCSI drives stripped in an array is really the only way to go for a useful, dependable uncompressed editing system. If all you want to do is capture footage and then burn it to dvd then you may get away with fw800. I would still buy two drives and stripe them in an array though.
The fw400 interface (and therefore the fw800) is more than capable of handling uncompressed video but the firewire400 diskdrives are not. It really is about the disk drives rather than the interface and its the SCSI drives that still rule the speed charts.
Hope that helps
Thanks for using Macosx.com
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As you guessed, the difference between FW400 and FW800 is the speed at which the port works. FW800 is roughly 800Mb/s (mega bits not bytes!)
As to the question of whether you can capture uncompressed video, the answer is "sort of" but "not really".
take firewire 400 for example. there is no drive I am aware of that can run at that speed. The actual hard disks are usually ide types running through a "bridge" to convert them to firewire400. My point being that the 400 and 800 numbers refer to the interface type, not the speed of the drive itself.
To capture uncompressed you will need your drives to be quite happy at handling data rates of 25MB/s or so. fw400 drives are rated faster than this so in theory they should be up to the task, let alone fw800. In practice the drives become much less efficient once they start getting loaded with data. The video editing process is very demanding too, requiring the drives to work much faster than the capture process.
To handle uncompressed video reliably you need very fast robust storage. Its not good if the drive is being pushed close to its limit. For this reason SCSI really is the order of the day. Super fast SCSI drives stripped in an array is really the only way to go for a useful, dependable uncompressed editing system. If all you want to do is capture footage and then burn it to dvd then you may get away with fw800. I would still buy two drives and stripe them in an array though.
The fw400 interface (and therefore the fw800) is more than capable of handling uncompressed video but the firewire400 diskdrives are not. It really is about the disk drives rather than the interface and its the SCSI drives that still rule the speed charts.
Hope that helps
Thanks for using Macosx.com
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