Dan Knight
- 2001.04.23
I still live in the universe where a 10 GB hard drive seems huge - I
have over 2 GB free on the drive in my TiBook. At the same time,
when it comes to buying a 3.5" hard drive these days, it's hard to find
anything that small. In fact, I picked up an IBM Deskstar 75GXP 30 GB
drive from
Buy.com for $137.95 in December. It's one of the best values of
price and performance on the market.
I never did install it in my old desktop computer - I bought my
TiBook before I found the time. Instead, I decided to find the right
FireWire enclosure for it, giving me a lot of extra storage space and a
really fast way to back up files.
In February, FireWire Depot
sent me their Flex-HDD 3.5" FireWire/USB
enclosure, which has two FireWire ports and one USB port. USB
performance was horrendously slow, and FireWire didn't seem as fast as
it should have been.
But I'd heard rumblings of a new Oxford 911 FireWire bridge that
would put the old electronics to shame. Last week I heard that
Other World Computing had an enclosure (their Mercury Elite
FireWire Case) in stock with the new Oxford chip. I ordered it
Thursday, it came on Friday, and I put the Deskstar drive inside.
As with the Flex enclosure, there were no directions, but I figured
out how to take the case apart, install the drive, and put everything
back together. The only tool you need is a Philips screwdriver to put
10 screws in place.
Drivers
I powered up the drive, plugged it into the back of my Titanium PowerBook, and ran
some quick tests, then tried to partition the drive. Drive Setup told
me it was an unsupported drive.
No problem. I loaded the Disk Control 1.1 software that came with
the case - and it didn't even see a drive on the FireWire bus.
Frustrating, since I wanted to create several partitions.
Rob Art Morgan of Bare Feats suggested I power up the FireWire drive
after the computer was already running. That solved the problem; Disk
Control ran just fine and allowed me to create three 8 GB
partitions plus one of about 4.6 GB. (One for my work drive, one
"emergency" partition, one to play with OS X at some point, and
one to back up my wife's iBook.)
FireWire Performance
Of course, just having the drive up and running is never enough for
Low End Mac. We want numbers. We want benchmarks. So I ran MacBench 5,
which rates the internal 10 GB drive in my TiBook at 1377. With the
disk cache set at the default of 8 MB, the disk test scored a very
respectable 1874 - 36% faster than the internal drives score and 31%
faster than the 1426 score of the Flex enclosure.
The next test was TimeDrive 1.3, which measures the internal drive
of my TiBook at 10,485 KBps (kilobytes per second) for writes and
31,457 KBps for reads. In this test, the external drive tied on writes,
achieving 10,485 KBps, and provied half the read performance (15,728
KBps). By way of comparison, the older enclosure measured 7,864 KBps
for writes (25% slower) and 10,485 KBps for reads (one-third internal
performance, two-thirds Oxford 911 performance).
The following table shows results using the ATTO Tools Benchmark on
the IBM Deskstar 75GXP with the Oxford 911 bridge and in the older
Flex-HDD enclosure and compares this to results for the internal 10 GB
Toshiba drive in my TiBook and results reported for the 10 GB IBM drive
on Accelerate Your Mac!
ATTO Tools Benchmark, 8 MB cache
Drive Peak Read Sust. Read Peak Write Sust. Write
Oxford 911 19.00 MBps 18.80 MBps 12.29 MBps 12.23 MBps
Flex FireWire 11.34 MBps 11.17 MBps 8.04 MBps 7.99 MBps
10 GB Toshiba 37.61 MBps 13.41 MBps 28.67 MBps 13.02 MBps
10 GB IBM* 37.26 MBps 15.79 MBps 24.29 MBps 5.67 MBps
* results from Accelerate Your Mac!, 2/19/01.
ATTO Tools Benchmark, 128 KB cache
Drive Peak Read Sust. Read Peak Write Sust. Write
Oxford 911 18.52 MBps 18.11 MBps 12.20 MBps 12.00 MBps
10 GB Toshiba 43.20 MBps 13.43 MBps 22.29 MBps 12.90 MBps
We have some very interesting results here. For peak reads and
writes, nothing touches the speed of the internal hard drive. The
internal Toshiba drive also beats out the Oxford 911 for sustained
writes, although not by a huge margin. But for sustained reads, the
combination of the IBM Deskstar 75GXP drive and Oxford 911 bridge wins
the day.
Update: May 15, 2001
I've been corresponding with Rob Art Morgan at Bare Feats, who suspects Apple may have
scaled back FireWire performance on PowerBooks, since he's obtained
sustained read speeds of
35 MBps using the Oxford 911 bridge connected to a desktop G4. I
recently obtained a Cube to use while my TiBook
is in for repair. Benchmark tests confirm that FireWire performance on
the TiBook is severely compromised - sustained read and write
benchmarks range from 60-80% faster with the Cube.
ATTO Tools Benchmark, 8 MB cache
Drive Peak Read Sust. Read Peak Write Sust. Write
Oxford/TiBook 19.00 MBps 18.80 MBps 12.29 MBps 12.23 MBps
Oxford/Cube 33.56 MBps 33.54 MBps 23.46 MBps 19.73 MBps
ATTO Tools Benchmark, 128 KB cache
Drive Peak Read Sust. Read Peak Write Sust. Write
Oxford/TiBook 18.52 MBps 18.11 MBps 12.20 MBps 12.00 MBps
Oxford/Cube 35.61 MBps 33.42 MBps 23.93 MBps 19.24 MBps
Conclusion
Brand name fully assembled FireWire hard drives are either
relatively slow or relatively expensive. Having the ability to put the
drive mechanism of your choice (for speed, cost, and size) in an
enclosure that unleashes the drives potential is a viable option. And
at this point, that means an enclosure with the Oxford 911 bridge.
In this case, the drive and enclosure cost about $280, less than
practically any 7200 RPM drive available today - and I know I have the
fastest FireWire bridge and one of the fastest hard drives inside the
enclosure.
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