Firewire vs. IDE Hard drives

[Jay]

This is for small office windows workstations:

I have a Workstation with a SCSI harddrive and want to add a large capacity
(100Gb, not too expensive) storage. I was thinking of IDE. But, I have been
reading about Firewire and am wondering if I should seriously consider
external Firewire Harddrives as they are not that expensive and should be
portable too.

I am probably a little behind on the new technologies but - is it time to
completely drop IDE (at least for additional storage) and start using
Firewire? Once again, this if for small office, not home use.

Any drawbacks on using Firewire Harddrives (vs. IDE)?

Thanks,
Jay

 

[kony]

This is for small office windows workstations:

I have a Workstation with a SCSI harddrive and want to add a large capacity
(100Gb, not too expensive) storage. I was thinking of IDE. But, I have been
reading about Firewire and am wondering if I should seriously consider
external Firewire Harddrives as they are not that expensive and should be
portable too.

I am probably a little behind on the new technologies but - is it time to
completely drop IDE (at least for additional storage) and start using
Firewire? Once again, this if for small office, not home use.

Any drawbacks on using Firewire Harddrives (vs. IDE)?

Thanks,
Jay

Do you NEED it portable? That's pretty much the sole determining
factor, then weight that against the odds that if it were portable,
someone might walk off with it.

As for drawbacks, it's slower, more expensive, louder, uses another
outlet and more space... all worthwhile compromises if you need it
somewhere else, but on the other hand I'd expect you have a network so
it's not like it can't be shared if an internal?


Dave

 

[DaveW]

USB 2.0 is used more commonly than Firewire, and is just as fast.

 

[stacey]

Do you NEED it portable? That's pretty much the sole determining
factor, then weight that against the odds that if it were portable,
someone might walk off with it.

As for drawbacks, it's slower,

Are you sure? I thought firewire was at 400Mbit/s which even converted to
MB/s should be enough to deal with todays drives? A year ago they were
getting 40MBs out of them.

 

[kony]

Are you sure? I thought firewire was at 400Mbit/s which even converted to
MB/s should be enough to deal with todays drives? A year ago they were
getting 40MBs out of them.

I'm sure that some (if not all now) typical, relatively new (consider
12 months old or less) 7K2 ATA100 & ATA133 drives exceed 400Mbit/s,
sustained thoughput. When talking about a newer drive with 8MB cache,
it's even more of a bottleneck... even on the evil Via chipsets. ;-)

Ignoring the firewire throuhput though, consider what you have... a
bridge chip with a buffer... it is inherant that it be slower even if
firewire was 30X as fast as internal ATA. I don't have any figures
on how much of a penalty that incurs, but any penalty is an additional
slowdown.


Dave

 

[John McGaw]

Are you sure? I thought firewire was at 400Mbit/s which even converted to
MB/s should be enough to deal with todays drives? A year ago they were
getting 40MBs out of them.

Nah. The actual drive INSIDE that shiny Firewire external case is an IDE
drive of the same sort that you'd install internally in your computer. And
often they aren't even the better quality drives since fast IDE drives put
of a good bit of heat and the little external cases aren't always able to
dissipate heat very well. So even if the Firewire is able to handle the data
quickly it can't do anything to make the drive inside do the same so
everything slows to a (relative) crawl. If somebody needs extra storage +
portability then the external cases, either Firewire or USB 2 are able to
handle the necessary data rate easily. But for speed an internal drive will
always be as fast, or faster because a 10Krpm can be chosen, and cheaper.
--
John McGaw
[Knoxville, TN, USA]

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