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PAGE SPEED
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on speed upgrades rob-ART
morgan, The Best
Drives and Memory Upgrades
At Great Prices Has Bare Feats helped
you? Say "thanks"... with a donation. FireWire
RAID Revisited or by
rob-ART,
mad scientist The RAID function
in OS X's Disk Utility will work with FireWire
drives, not just Ultra ATA and SCSI. I decided to
create a striped array (RAID 0) using the two new
Granite Digital Hot Swap FireWire case kits and a
pair of IBM Deskstar 120GXP's. CONCLUSION FireWire still
isn't as fast as Ultra ATA in either single drive
configuration or striped pairs. However, if you
are going to do FireWire RAID, you need more than
Apple's built-in dual FireWire ports. You need to
create a second controller or channel by adding a
PCI FireWire card. As you can see from the graphs
above, by putting one drive on the internal FW port
and the other on the PCI FW port, the speed
increased considerably. WARNING: Not all FireWire PCI
cards are created equal. Speeds vary from 16MB/sec
to 32MB/sec, depending on firmware and chip set.
(See notes below on what card I used.) TEST
HARDWARE & SOFTWARE Tests were
conducted using Intech's
QuickBench X. Test "mule" was a G4/1000MP Power Mac
running OS X (10.2). The RAID software used is
"built" into the Disk Utility that comes with
Apple's
OS X. The drives used were
IBM
Deskstar 120GXP's
(120GB, 7200rpm) which are available from various
sources including GoogleGear
(search on "120gxp"), Trans
International, and
Other
World Computing.
For FireWire Case
Kit, I chose the NEW Granite Digital
FireVUE
Hot Swap because
it is fast, rugged, and cool running. And the drive
trays make backing up and managing disk hungry
projects economical and easy. I chose the
FWDepot
FireWire/USB card because it's the fastest I've
ever tested. I would have
used their dual channel FW PCI card but the
sustained WRITE speed was an unimpressive 16MB/sec.
(More on that after more testing.) (Bare
Feats is hosted on a G4 Power Mac server by MacDock.com)
mad scientist and webmaster
MacGurus
-- "Quality Upgrades, Expert Staff"
"Why You Need Dual Channel FireWire"
Posted
8/9/02
Big Mahalo to Granite
Digital
for providing the Hot Swap FW test units
and to FWDepot
for the PCI FW/USB card.
"BARE facts on Macintosh speed FEATS"
Email webmaster at rob-art@barefeats.com
