Average firewire 400 speeds

MichaelHo · 21 Mar 2007 at 17:05

Hi,
Have just got a WD Mybook Pro 500GB external hard drive. It is connected to my macbook via firewire 400.
Im transferring 1GB in about 40secs, is this about right?
Is there anyway of speeding it up? e.g. getting it closer to the 400MB/s range.

matja · 21 Mar 2007 at 17:13

Firewire 400 is 400mbit/s, not MB/s (well actually its 398mbit/s I think, but close enough), giving you a maximum speed of 50MB/s. I think this is the aggregate speed of the signal pairs, too - giving you 50MB/s max in one direction only, but realistically lower due to packet header and IO request overheads. Your speeds do seem a little low, however - not sure why.

You'd need Firewire 800, eSATA or SCSI to not be a bottleneck for the HD.

rpstewart · 21 Mar 2007 at 18:02

Is that a single 1Gb file your using? It works out at about 25Mb/s which is maybe a shade on the slow side - I can get 35Mb/s over USB2 out to my Lacie.

What you also have to take into consideration however is the disk in the Macbook, it'll only be a 2.5" disk and may well only be a 5400rpm part so there is a possibility that the source disk is also part of the problem.

EDIT: The target filesystem is probably FAT32, I found that I got an increase in speed reformatting my external as NTFS, obviously that won't work for a Mac but you might get a benefit from using the Mac equivalent.

lsg1r · 21 Mar 2007 at 19:36

I used to get around 45-50MB/s when transferring from laptop to pc via firewire 400.

MichaelHo · 21 Mar 2007 at 23:24

The file size was 7.8GB, the external hdd is formated to a mac file system.
Will try some more file sizes to see, USB 2.0 from pc to the mybook is a lot slower than the firewire 400 (mybook to mac).