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by
rob-ART,
mad scientist
Posted 01/13/03
Big Mahalo to WiebeTech
for giving me an early look at their FireWire 800
products.
The prospect of
FireWire 800 in a PowerBook is exciting but the
prospect of FireWire 800 in a Power Mac is even
more exciting. Here's an early look at the results
achieved with an IBM 180GXP connected to a
WiebeTech
FireWire 800 bridge board which in turn was plugged
into a FireWire 800 PCI card which in turn was
installed in a Power Mac G4/1000MP (SDRAM) tower.
Vroom, vroom!
INSIGHTS
The READ
speed of this FireWire 800 setup was
significantly faster than the built-in FireWire
400 of the Power Mac. In fact, it was on par
with the READ speed of the same drive on an ATA-133
controller board. The drive itself is probably the
limiting factor, not the interface.
However, the
WRITE speed was only slightly better than
that of built-in FireWire 400 and a lot slower than
ATA-133. It may be partly the fault of the PCI
subsystem. When I used FireWire 400 PCI cards, the
write speeds varied from 16 to 29MB/sec, depending
on which brand of board I used. The Wiebetech
FireWire 400 PCI card peaked at 27MB/sec so
33MB/sec is at least some improvement.
Inquiring minds
want to know...
"How
fast does a dual drive striped FireWire
800 RAID go?"
"How does fast
does FW 800 go on a Pentium 4 Wintel
system?"
(Stay tuned
for the answers...)
OPINIONS
I'm puzzled by
the WRITE speed limitation that seems to
exist with all PCI based FireWire solutions. Hmmm.
Hopefully both Apple and third parties will find
more write speed as the FireWire 800 products
mature.
Like you and
everyone else, I'm dying to find out how fast the
built-in FireWire 800 goes on the new 17"
PowerBook.
I'm told by
someone who writes drivers for hard drives that
READ speed is the more critical than WRITE
speed. If you accept that premise, you'll be
very pleased with the new FireWire 800 products
from WiebeTech
and others.
The FireWire 800
bridgeboard by WiebeTech
uses the Oxford Semiconductor OXUF922
firewire bridge, which is likely to become the next
standard for 800mbit storage enclosures, just as
the OXFW911 has been the prevailing market standard
for 1394a. The "922" is currently the only bridge
available in production volumes.
You'll want to
use an ATA-6 drive like the IBM 180GXP to
get the most out of FireWire 800. When I tested the
ATA-5 drives (like the 120GXP), the gain provided
by FireWire 800 was less dramatic.
TEST
HARDWARE & SOFTWARE
Test "mule" was a
G4/1000MP Power Mac (SDRAM) running OS X (10.2.3)
and latest beta FireWire 800 FireWire drivers from
Apple.
The FireWire 800
hardware included a "caseless" WiebeTech
FireWire 800 bridge board (pulling power off the
Power Mac), a WiebeTech
FireWire 800 PCI controller card, and a FireWire
800 9pin to 9pin cable. Though these products
aren't shipping as of this posting, they were
"production compliant prototypes."
The ATA-133 card
used was the Sonnet Tempo
ATA-133
PCI controller.
The test drive
used was an IBM
Deskstar 180GXP
(186GB, 7200rpm, 8MB buffer).
BENCHMARK
TEST...
QuickBench
X
(version 2) was used to measure Random
Read/Write (1M blocks) as well as Sustained
Read/Write with 100MB blocks.
REAL WORLD TESTS
included...
1.
Duplicating a 457MB document on the test drive,
forcing it to read and write to itself,
simultaneously.
2. Rotating a
45MB document in Adobe
Photoshop 7
with application size set to 41MB... thereby
creating a low memory condition and forcing
Photoshop to write to the scratch
disk.
3. Playing
back all frames of a 177MB five second
QuickTime
movie file.
MORE READING MATERIAL ON FIREWIRE 800
Apple
Knowledge Base: FireWire 800 Technology
Brief
MacNN's MacWorld SF '03 FireWire
800 Product Roundup
FireWire
Networking Without Extra Hardware or
Software or try UniBrain's
FireNet product.
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