I
recently noticed a significant difference
between running certain drives under Apple's
"generic" FireWire enablers and drives formatted
with third party formatters and mounted with
third party extensions. So I gathered up the
latest version of four companies'
formatter/drivers and ran various tests using a
Maxtor 3000DV FireWire drive.
GO TO PAGE
TWO
TO SEE RANDOM READ/WRITE WITH 1024K BLOCK SIZE
and 128K BLOCK SIZE.
CONCLUSION
FWB's
Hard Disk Toolkit 4.5.1 was fastest in 5 out of
8 tests and second fastest on two. That's a good
argument for spending the extra money on third
party disk software to get better FireWire
performance.
My second
choice would be Intech
HDST 3.4 which was strong on random write
speed.
12/20/01: I
found out today that the FireWire loader I was
using from FWB
is not available to the public until December
24th. However, anyone who has version 4.5 of
HDToolkit will get a free upgrade to 4.5.2,
which will have the version of the loader I used
and some other improvements.
WHAT ABOUT
RAID SUPPORT?
All four third
parties have either separate or combined support
of RAID. Intech
and Charismac
limit you to two drive RAID 0. FWB's
HD Toolkit and VST's
FireRAID support more than two drives in a RAID
0 (striped) and RAID 1 (mirrored). (Watch for
a future report on FireWire RAID using dual
FireWire channels.)
TEST
NOTES
The test
"mule" was an Apple
Power Mac G4/800MP running OS 9.2 with disk
cache set to 512K (to diminish effect of system
caching), AppleTalk OFF, Virtual Memory OFF, and
Extensions set to minimal (BASE).
TEST
DRIVE:
Maxtor
Personal Storage 3000DV FireWire (7200RPM
60GB)
TEST
DRIVERS/FORMATTERS:
FWB
HD Toolkit 4.5 (with 4.5.2 loader)
Intech
HD Speed Tools 3.4
Charismac
Anubis
Smart
Disk/VST
Formatter 2.3
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© 1995-2007 Rob Art Morgan
"BARE facts on Macintosh speed FEATS"
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