Granite Digital's Bridge Board Breaks The 30MB/sec Barrier For Single FireWire Drives! Post Date: February 19th, 2001 by rob ART morgan, chief test pilot I've been very disappointed with the speed of FireWire drives up until now. But there's a new gunslinger in town. Granite Digital showed up with MacWorld Expo with their FireWire enclosure featuring a FireWire-to-IDE bridge board with the new Oxford 911 chip set. THEY SOLD OUT. I'm embarrassed to say that I overlooked their booth at the show but an alert reader told me about them. Granite was fresh out of enclosures when I called but they were kind enough to send me a couple of the "bare" bridge boards which I could connect to a couple of Ultra ATA/100 drives for testing (courtesy of TransIntl.com). I've just begun to test but here's the exciting early results:     PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS As you can see, the "bare" Granite Digital bridge board with "bare" drive is much faster than the VST, Maxtor and FWDepot drives. In fact, a single drive using the Granite Digital board was faster than a dual drive striped array using VST's FireRAID! The sustained READ/WRITE performance of a FireWire matches that of the same drive running on an Ultra ATA/66 interface. Now you don't have to give up speed when you use the drive for external FireWire. Notice I ran the RAID arrays on single and double FireWire bus configurations. Apple ships all their computers with a single FireWire bus (with 1 or 2 ports). But if you add a PCI FireWire card or PCMCIA FireWire card, you have just created a second bus. If you split your striped RAID array over the two buses, you get an added speed bump. Exciting stuff, eh?   Flash: New G4's Burn Hotter I connected the Granite Digital bridge board to a new Dual G4/533 running Mac OS 9.1 and got sustained WRITE speed of 30MB/sec! I was using FireWire 2.8 Support and no other drivers. Check it out: Other Thoughts The Oxford Semiconductor web site has an Overview PDF sheet available on the 911 chip set. I understand that Texas Instruments has an equally fast chip set ready for use on FireWire bridge boards. I did some testing with the 45GB version of the IBM 75GXP. Since it posted the same times as the 30GB version, I didn't bother to post them. Did you know that if you unplug a drive from the built-in Ultra ATA interface of a G3 or G4 Mac and plug it into a FireWire enclosure, you usually don't have to reformat it? However, if the drive connected to an Ultra ATA PCI controller, it WILL have to be reformatted due to the fact that the Ultra ATA controller is emulating a SCSI interface.   WHERE TO BUY Granite Digital assures me they will have more FireWire enclosures soon. Watch for other FireWire enclosure makers like FWDepot and TransIntl to follow suit and offer their own enclosure with a faster bridge board. And expect sealed drive enclosure makers like VST to join the race, since they pride themselves as having the best FireWire software and hardware. Although a generic Oxford extension comes with the Granite enclosures, you might contact FWB Software for a new version of Hard Disk Toolkit (4.5?) that's supposed to support ALL FireWire drives (including FireWire RAID). If you need bare Ultra ATA/100 drives for your 3.5 inch FireWire enclosure, I recommend the IBM 75GXP drive in any size. It's currently the fastest Ultra ATA/100 money can buy. Shop at TransIntl as well as Buy.Com.   TEST NOTES TESTING HARDWARE: An Apple G4/500 Sawtooth and 512MB of "222" PC-100 memory. Mac OS 9.04, FireWire 2.5, VST FireWire Extension 2.2.1, VM off, ATALK off, clock display off, minimal extensions. Disk cache set to 128K (minimum setting). FIREWIRE DRIVE CONFIGURATIONS: Built-in FireWire controller driving a single FWDepot "thin, silvery" 3.5 inch enclosure with an IBM 75GXP 30G 7200rpm ATA/100 drive using VST's FireWire extension. Built-in FireWire controller driving a single Maxtor enclosure with a Maxtor 80GB 5400rpm ATA/100 drive using VST's FireWire extension. Built-in FireWire controller driving a single VST FireWire full height 45GB drive using VST's FireWire extension. Built-in FireWire controller connected to Granite Digital's new FireWire/IDE bridge board (from their enclosure) driving an IBM 75GXP 30G 7200rpm Ultra/100 drive using and VST's FireWire extension. Built-in FireWire controller driving two VST FireWire full height 45GB drives using VST's FireRAID software. Built-in FireWire controller driving two Granite Digital's FireWire/IDE bridge boards plugged into two IBM 75GXP 30G 7200rpm Ultra/100 drives using VST's FireRAID software. Built-in FireWire controller and VST's FireWire/USB Combo PCI card driving two VST FireWire full height 45GB drives using VST's FireRAID software. Built-in FireWire controller driving two Granite Digital FireWire/IDE bridge boards plugged into two IBM 75GXP 30G 7200rpm Ultra/100 drives using VST's FireRAID software. TESTING SOFTWARE: SUSTAINED READ AND WRITE The sustained read/write benchmark was run using ExpressPro-Tools 2.4.1 (SCSI and Fibre Channel version 2.5 for Mac). When you launch it, it displays all the mounted drives (IDE, SCSI, FireWire). Select the drive you want to test (one click). Then go to the Utilities menu and select Benchmark Volume. A test window will appear. Set Max Transfer Size to 8MB. Then press start. On my graphs I display sustained rate, not peak rate. Peak rate is skewed by the drive cache and doesn't reflect real world performance. I noticed version 2.5 is available for downloading.

HOME PAGE SPEED TEST RESULTS from Bare Feats (by CATEGORY) Some pages are translated into FRENCH by MacGeneration. LINKS to SPEED tests on other web sites HOT SPEED DEALS DOWNLOADS that add more SPEED SPEED UPGRADE guide Rob Art Morgan Publisher & Chief Test Pilot rob-art@barefeats.com

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