eSATA or Firewire 800?...
Monday, September 28, 2009 at 9:32AM Most of my screencasts are recorded on my MacBook Pro and as I mentioned in a recent show, now that Snow Leopard has "beefed up" screen sharing, I record using ScreenFlow on the machine but view and control it from my Mac Pro.
Works a treat!
I've always had a separate user account on the MacBook Pro, specifically setup for using when recording screencasts. It's just easier to control a separate account and I can configure it to keep it looking fairly clean and tidy (unlike my normal user account).
However, the more I think about it, it would actually be better to have a completely separate SL build which I could restore back to a fresh install at any time. That would give me complete freedom on what I install, when I install, and overall control of the configuration of the machine without fear of screwing up my working configuration.
The current SSD drive on the MacBook Pro is just 256GB so I don't really want to sacrifice any of that usable space by partitioning a separate partition, so I've been experimenting with using an external 500GB 7200RPM hard drive via Firewire 800. I've split this into two separate partitions and installed a clean install of Snow Leopard on the primary, configured it with all the tools I need to do my screen captures, and backed it up to the second partition using SuperDuper. This seems to work fine!
On to my question.
;)
Click for bigger image
I'm using the NewTech Voyager "Q" Quad external interface via Firewire 800 to connect the drive to the MacBook Pro. This gives me a fast connection to the drive (though not as fast as with the SSD!) and I'm able to boot from the external drive just fine.
However, I suddenly remembered that this unit supports drives via an eSATA connection! (as per illustration - connection 7)
Hmmm...
My MacBook Pro has an ExpressCard slot and you can pick up an eSATA ExpressCard for £30 or less.
My question is...
Would I really notice any difference in throughput or real world performance if I went with the eSATA connection to the external boot drive rather than the current FireWire 800 connection?
I'd be interested in anyones thoughts!
Don McAllister
I've ordered the eSata ExpressCard so I'll do some comparisons when it arrives to see if it makes any real world difference.
Reader Comments (6)
I would think that the eSata connection would be the faster of the two, although I have never tested them against each other. I use external eSata disc arrays, 4TB and 8TB versions, connected to client Mac Pros with great results.
However, there is the issue of "what will Apple do?" Will future Apple models support Firewire 800? Based upon Apple's previous behavior (behaviour) one can expect them to abandon that connector in the future, perhaps the near future. Furthermore, they have been eliminated the ExpressCard slot on most models and I expect them to make it disappear soon.
Further clouding this issue is the imminent arrival of USB 3.0, at least in the Windows PC world, which may kill Firewire 800 in all guises.
Don -- There's a good comparison chart of speeds of various interfaces on this Wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esata#External_SATA
Get the adapter but keep the receipt so you can return it if you're not happy with it. Couple of limitations... the cable is limited to 2 meters and you can only have one device connected (unless you use a port multiplier).
Looking forward to hearing how it goes.
I'm not sure why you're bothering with a SuperDupered backup on the same physical drive. Sounds like false security.
The SuperDuper backup isn't for security, it's so I can restore the initial partition to a known state quickly. I'll keep a second SD backup on an external drive for security.
Don, I use the Sonnet Express eSATA card for the MBPro which is more expensive but faster ( 64 bit driver for SL expected this month). I use this to a striped RAID for photoshop scratch disc.
I've been using this for some time now on an iMac with FW800. Works great!
Although I think it does sporadically wake the computer from sleep mostly at night. However this may be the local Apple TV too. I've never been able to track this problem down. But it is better in Snow Leopard so I guess I'll just deal with it.