Firewire 800 Speeds?

owaters

owaters

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I recently bought a FW800 External Lacie HD and I was assuming that data copying was going to be at the speed of light. Now it is fast but should it be faster?

At the moment, data copies across at approx 20MB/sec, should this be faster? If so, what could I possibly doing wrong?

I thought this was supposed to copy at 800MB/sec, or am I just dumb!?
 
Firewire 800 has a maximum transfer rate of 800 Mbits/sec. That would translate to a maximumtransfer rate of 100 MB/sec (1 byte = 8 bits). However, most ATA drives have a sustained transfer rate of between 20 - 30 MB/s. So if you're getting 20MB/s when transfering files, I think you're doing alright. I'm not familiar with SCSI drives, so you might get slightly better speeds from those.
 
Depends on the SCSI drive, but as far as I know, there are little-to-no SCSI-FireWire 800 solutions at the moment.

The whole megaBITS-megaBYTES-mebiBITS-mebiBYTES thing is a little confusing. Viro's right -- the "800" in "FireWire 800" refers to megaBITS, not megaBYTES. Doing the math does yield about 100megaBYTES per second, but there aren't any single hard drives sold that will get even close to 100megaBYTES per second. If you had a FireWire 800 RAID solution with multiple hard drives arranged in a fast array, then you may see significant speed boosts, but for now, 20 to 30megaBYTES per second is pretty fast for a hard drive.
 
Now, one could ask: "what do I need FireWire800 then, if most of the disks only support 30mb/sec? I will pick FireWire400!"
Answer: having more capacitites has the benefit that you will be able to plug 3 of such disks and still run each of them at their max. transfer rate. If you would use FireWire400 and have three 30mb/sec disks plugged, you would only be able to run each at 15mb/sec when using a hub.
However, there are also disks (not only SCSI ones) that transfer more than 60mb/sec. Such disks are spinning at a very high rate and cause a lot of noise, heat and waste too much energy. Not really suitable for storage solutions..
 
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