New iBook FireWire Blows Away G4 PowerBook FireWire! June 12th, 2001 modified June 15th, 2001, to include the Pismo G3/500 and TiBook with cardbus by rob ART morgan, Bare Feats Mad Scientist I was wondering if the new 2001 iBook was going to show the same deficient FireWire speed as the G4 Titanium PowerBook exhibited. I meant to test it when I compared the two in terms of CPU and Graphics. But it slipped my mind until a reader wrote that he had heard the iBook had an improved I/O bus controller. So I tested it with one of the newest, fastest FireWire drive enclosures and guess what!     PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS The iBook 2001 reads and writes to FireWire drives MUCH FASTER than the G4 Titanium PowerBook. Moreover, it is on par with the newest desktop iMacs and PowerMacs. Note that using a cardbus FireWire interface improves the READ speed but the WRITE speed gets worse. Also note that the TiBook is no faster than the G3/500 PowerBook Pismo that preceded it. This seems to reinforce my theory: There was an engineering faux pas on the Titanium because they used the "older" I/O controller, thinking it was fast enough for existing FireWire drives. But I don't think they tested it with the new crop of 3.5 inch "Oxford 911" FireWire drives capable of sustained rates of over 30MB/sec. In Apple's defense, the new drives didn't show up until January 2001, the same month the PowerBook Titanium was introduced. Hopefully, Apple will correct this deficiency by using a better performing I/O controller chip on a "Revision 2" logic board for the TiBook. (And, Apple, while you are making modifications, how about adding a GeForce2 Go graphics chip?)   TEST NOTES TEST FIREWIRE DRIVE/ENCLOSURE Other World Computing Elite "Oxford 911" version of their Mercury FireWire enclosure with an IBM 75GXP 30G ATA/100 7200rpm drive courtesy of Trans International TEST SYSTEMS All the test systems listed above were running Mac OS 9.1 and FireWire 2.8.1 or 2.8.1 (neither which provided any improvement in speed over 2.7). SUSTAINED READ AND WRITE The sustained read/write benchmark was run using ExpressPro-Tools 2.5 (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.

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