Incredibly slow firewire disk throughput

[Roof Fiddler]

I'm copying a 60GB file from my internal 300GB SATA drive to my external
250GB firewire drive.
With RC2 on an Athlon 64 with 1GB RAM with Vista reporting 664MB used, and
CPU usage averaging about 15%, and resource monitor reporting that nothing
besides explorer.exe is using much disk bandwidth (explorer.exe is reading
from the SATA drive at about 535MB/min and writing to the firewire drive at
about the same rate), and the disks audibly moving their heads only a couple
times every few seconds, explorer reports that my file is copying at
8.66MB/s (a bit under 70Mb/s).
That's a small fraction of the sustained sequential transfer rates of modern
disks, and a small fraction of the firewire bandwidth. I would have expected
the copy to proceed at least 3 or 4 times this speed.

The problem can't possibly be the SATA drive or the computer's SATA hardware
or Vista's SATA software because even while the 60GB transfer mentioned
above is still in progress, I tried copying a 450MB file on the SATA drive
(from one filename to another), and the transfer averaged about 15MB/s,
which means the SATA drive was sustaining over 38MB/s total (read the 450MB
file, write a copy of the 450MB file, and read the 60GB file all
simultaneously).

So the problem must be on the firewire side. I don't have another computer
or another firewire drive I can test, and it's not practical now to try
another OS.

Why is it so slow?

 

[Jeff]

Hi,
Is firewire 1394?
If so, I thought I heard that 1394 isn't supported in Vista.
Gave it a shot. might be why

Jeff

 

[Robert Moir]

Hi,
Is firewire 1394?
If so, I thought I heard that 1394 isn't supported in Vista.
Gave it a shot. might be why

That can't be right. Not supporting Firewire would be an absolute joke.

 

[Toby Broom]

I've used my firewire drive.

That can't be right. Not supporting Firewire would be an absolute joke.

 

[Tom Lake]

Hi,
Is firewire 1394?
If so, I thought I heard that 1394 isn't supported in Vista.
Gave it a shot. might be why

I don't have any firewire devices but I do have a port for them
and it shows up in Device Manager with no errors.

Tom Lake

 

[Robert Moir]

I've used my firewire drive.

As have I. The OP's problem wasn't that the drive didn't work but rather
that the throughput was awful.

 

[HDFatBoy2003]

I've been searching for answers on this question also. Vista does support
1394 but at what level I've not been able to determine. I've read articles
that 1394b is not support at this time and won't be until SP1. Okay I'll
live with that, but it seems HD wise 1394 is running at S100 speeds instead
of the standard S400, much like it was implemented in XP.

 

[Roof Fiddler]

I've been searching for answers on this question also. Vista does support
1394 but at what level I've not been able to determine. I've read
articles that 1394b is not support at this time and won't be until SP1.
Okay I'll live with that, but it seems HD wise 1394 is running at S100
speeds instead of the standard S400, much like it was implemented in XP.

That would explain it.
So I tried using the USB interface on the same drive, and got sustained
throughput over 21MB/s, compared to the under 9MB/s I got with firewire.
It would be really interesting to hear what lame excuse MS gives for failure
to run at S400.
"Uh, we've got over 50,000 employees here and billions of dollars in assets
and we've had half a decade to work on Vista, and we got USB running fast
with no problem, but uh, we don't really have the time, or enough
programmers, or uh, our programmers are too incompetent to get more than
token usability out of firewire."
"Huh? Uh, no, we would never tell our programmers to intentionally cripple
firewire so consumers will use only USB so manufacturers will produce only
USB equipment so Apple's firewire will fall by the wayside, why would you
ever suspect that?"
If MS wants to wage war and refuse to support firewire, that's fine, but it
shouldn't try to deceive people at the same time by pretending that it does
support firewire.

 

[Jane C]

Firewire itself is supported. What is not supported is IP over 1394, so no
networking via Firewire.

 

[Guest]

That is an interesting view. Is the support for Firewire given a lower
priority because it is from Apple, or maybe because USB devices are so much
more common. Lets face it, most of the devices that support firewire also
have a USB port. If the support for Firewire was there I would bet that only
a small percentage of Windows users would even know it.

Yes, Microsoft is a large organization and there are probably more than
thousand people working on Vista (but not 50,000), but that doesn't mean that
they don't have to make decisons on what is worked on and what isn't. There
were a number of features in the earlier alphas and betas that were removed
because they just couldn't be completed on time so why would they pick
Firewire support (used by a small percentage of users) over any of these
features that would be used by the majority of their user base?

That being said, if you upgraded your machine you might want to check the
driver in use in case it didn't upgrade and is still using the XP driver for
some reason. I also use a firewire external drive, and I am getting
considerably better throughput than you are reporting.

Given the choice, I hope Microsoft spends man hours fixing the numerous
other issues with Vista (like getting more devices to work properly, getting
their network issues resolved, and for Gods sake adding support for the
development tools on the platform) before even looking at Firewire.

 

[Toby Broom]

I took the same diskdrive (WD1000) & put it in my external Firewire
enclosure, max speed reported by copying 2x4.5Gb files was according to
windows 26.6Mb/s, put the same drive in my USB 2.0 enclosure 24.4Mb/s.

They seem the same to me.

 

[VideoEditorUnhappyWithVista]

This hotfix made it worse. Also, I have the TI chip set built into my
motherboard and the read/write performance is horribly slow. I am running
Vista 64bit Business.

 

[VideoEditorUnhappyWithVista]

The only reason I am still using a Windows machines is I hate MACs more.
Microsoft should be ashamed of what I have just discovered. I use my machine
primarily for editing Video. I also have VMWARE Workstation installed on my
machine. Trying to copy video off my DTE FS-4 PRO using Vista 64bit I get
556 kbps copy rate. Using VMWARE and Windows XP 32 bit I get over 40 mbs
copy rate. ALL I HAVE TO SAY IS YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED FOR PUTTING THIS CRAP
OS OUT! Running a Virtual Machine inside Vista I get better performance from
firewire. Microsoft is lucky I hate Steve more than than I hate Bill.