| Author | Thread |
|
|
07/06/2006 11:57:04 PM · #1 |
Wow, I just burned my very first DVD and I'm on a high!
Couldn't believe the speed that it was able to manage!
It will be very interesting to compare the actual burn speed of a full DVD using USB 2.0 vs using Firewire...
It took me around 12 minutes to complete a burn with lead in and lead-out...
Not half bad considering that it takes me around 6.5 minutes to burn a CD of 700MB...
OY!
Color me converted!
Anyhow, one thing that I noticed that was really odd was that when I loaded my DVD into the drive, the thumbnails loaded VERY quickly...
MUCH more quickly than when I was viewing the same information from my internal HD and a fair bit more quickly than when viewing them via USB from my source drive...
So this makes me wonder that possibly my external drive actually allows me to read information FASTER than my internal equipment in my laptop.
Curious!
Can anyone provide some info on this?
Is it actually faster to use external HD's than internal when using laptops?
I'm using IDE/ATA on my motherboard. SATA is newer than my current tech. |
|
|
|
07/07/2006 12:01:14 AM · #2 |
well an ATA133 drive can move info at 133 Megabytes per second or rather 1064 Megabits per second. Even USB2 is limited to 480 Megabits per second.
edit: ATA does go down to i think 33Megabytes per second or 254 Megabits per second. It also depends on the other system specs I'd imagine.
Message edited by author 2006-07-07 00:02:13. |
|
|
|
07/07/2006 12:01:50 AM · #3 |
| Yes to your faster question.. Laptop drives operate at a slower speed than desktop drives 4500 compared to 7200 (rpm) and the desktop drives usually have a larger cache memory anywhere from 8 to 16mb. Since most external drives use desktop drives it will be faster than your internal laptop drive. |
|
|
|
07/07/2006 12:20:37 AM · #4 |
Originally posted by eschelar:
USB 2.0 vs using Firewire... |
I've always heard that USB 2.0 and firewire are very similar. I was told there was no advantage to using firewire over USB 2.0. Not sure if that information was accurate or not.
|
|
|
|
07/07/2006 12:24:07 AM · #5 |
| If it just being used for HD / CD the difference is small but for things such as video editing firewire still has an edge. |
|
|
|
07/07/2006 08:54:45 AM · #6 |
drz01: You are quite correct that my on board drive is a powersaving 4500RPM drive, which might be a limiting factor, but I'm suspecting more along the lines of a bottleneck with cheap components on my motherboard....
Incidentally, I'm using USB 2.0 because while the DVD drive has both, they didn't include the right cable for my laptops IEEE 1394 connector. I just haven't had time to get to the store to pick up a converter or different cable.
USB 2.0 is faster than Firewire when it is used on a USB controller that is ONLY connected to one device, but I've read that if you plug in another device, it will allocate bandwidth for that device... A fair bit of it too... to the point where it will encroach on that speed advantage rather quickly... Also, using multiple protocols on a board is not always treated the same... For example, using a USB 1.1 mouse on a USB 2.0 board with two ports when a USB 2.0 HD or DVD drive is being used may cause the board to get a little 'confused' with the protocols and bring the drive's connection speed down...
Considering that there are 3 USB 2.0 protocols as well, this just reads as being messy to me...
I've always heard from most people with experience that if you are using straight data, stick with firewire as it's more dedicated and usually performs better.
The other external drive that I've checked against is a 5400RPM 40GB drive in what is likely an IDE enclosure connected to USB 2.0, but never seems to get anywhere near those speeds.
Maybe there is another bottleneck there...
Anyhow, it's good to know that the onboard drive is actually capable of higher speeds...
I have been considering switching to a 5400 RPM 100GB or 80GB on board drive, but didn't notice a major speed increase when I tried the 5400 as a primary drive for a week on board...
Might just be the computer... (1.6GHz Dothan series Centrino with 1.25GB DDR RAM - about a year old) |
|
|
|
07/07/2006 10:21:56 AM · #7 |
Originally posted by eschelar:
drz01: You are quite correct that my on board drive is a powersaving 4500RPM drive, which might be a limiting factor, but I'm suspecting more along the lines of a bottleneck with cheap components on my motherboard....
Incidentally, I'm using USB 2.0 because while the DVD drive has both, they didn't include the right cable for my laptops IEEE 1394 connector. I just haven't had time to get to the store to pick up a converter or different cable.
USB 2.0 is faster than Firewire when it is used on a USB controller that is ONLY connected to one device, but I've read that if you plug in another device, it will allocate bandwidth for that device... A fair bit of it too... to the point where it will encroach on that speed advantage rather quickly... Also, using multiple protocols on a board is not always treated the same... For example, using a USB 1.1 mouse on a USB 2.0 board with two ports when a USB 2.0 HD or DVD drive is being used may cause the board to get a little 'confused' with the protocols and bring the drive's connection speed down...
Considering that there are 3 USB 2.0 protocols as well, this just reads as being messy to me...
I've always heard from most people with experience that if you are using straight data, stick with firewire as it's more dedicated and usually performs better.
The other external drive that I've checked against is a 5400RPM 40GB drive in what is likely an IDE enclosure connected to USB 2.0, but never seems to get anywhere near those speeds.
Maybe there is another bottleneck there...
Anyhow, it's good to know that the onboard drive is actually capable of higher speeds...
I have been considering switching to a 5400 RPM 100GB or 80GB on board drive, but didn't notice a major speed increase when I tried the 5400 as a primary drive for a week on board...
Might just be the computer... (1.6GHz Dothan series Centrino with 1.25GB DDR RAM - about a year old) |
In addition to the drive speed differences, you likely only have 1 drive in your laptop which is doing other things(OS operations like page file usage, app loading, whatever else is going on) whereas your external is probably just loading data and that's all.
I think some of your info about USB vs Firewire isn't quite right. Firewire is point to point between devices, which means between any 2 connected devices operating at any given time you should be able to have full bandwidth. USB is shared across all devices in the chain. But due to the designs of firewire and USB, in theory(I haven't tested with multiple high speed devices personally) as soon as you have multiple devices operating on the chain, FireWire performance will drop much more then USB will in a similar setup, because firewire devices become contentious for access because there is no centralized master controller vs USBs intentional shared access and host controller based environment.
The advantage(which is why USB-To-Go was introduced) of Firewire's point-to-point hostless nature is that because it can operate indepenent of a host controller, you could plug your camcorder directly into your hard disk and transfer video, something you couldn't/can't do with USB2 where you'd need a host controller(usually a computer) in between.
In practice, in single high speed device setups that aren't bandwidth limited by the device(i.e. optical drives, which generally aren't fast enough to approach saturation of either bus type), Firewire tends to come out on top from everything I've seen. I know this is part because OSes(I think Windows is guilty of this) will sometimes be conservative on their USB utilization and I am sure there are some other reasons but I don't know them all.
The multiple protocal comment holds true for Firewire too, there is a newer Firewire standard too, which is faster then USB2, but is worse then USB in that it is not completely backwards compatible, in that it won't support a mixed environment. If you have 1 1394b device on the chain, they all have to be 1394b or it falls back to 1394a, which is different then what USB2 does with mixed environs. So it's actually messier with Firewire. USB does not get "confused" as you put it. It's designed to accomodate multiple protocols on the same bus, but it does slow down because it has to protocol switch for other devices. Firewire as I mentioned can't handle it all, it HAS to slow down, it's just that the "slower" firewire protocol is still quite a bit faster then the slower USB protocol. But it's apples to oranges, USB 1.0/1.1 was never really intended to host high speed devices like a hard drive. And I've never sene a Firewire mouse. So no matter how you look at it, it's not really a fair argument, it just depends on how you slant it. Firewire is faster in practice, all things being equal, but they very seldom are.
I should also add, technical arguements aside, there's one big advantage USB has over firewire: ubiquity. There's a lot to be said for being able to take your disk somewhere, and know you are likely to be able to plug it in where ever you go. Firewire may have that ability within a limited circle of people, but USB is just plain everywhere. It's not something I would discount to rapidly. You are thankful for it the first time you need to use it. Course that's solved easily if you have devices that will do either. :)
Oh, and last comment, so switching your internal disk to a faster one will help, but it still won't be on even footing unless you added another disk to act as pure data as well. Otherwise it will still be servicing requests for other tasks.
|
|
|
|
07/07/2006 10:44:12 AM · #8 |
Originally posted by justin_hewlett:
Originally posted by eschelar:
USB 2.0 vs using Firewire... |
I've always heard that USB 2.0 and firewire are very similar. I was told there was no advantage to using firewire over USB 2.0. Not sure if that information was accurate or not. |
By the specs, they are not very different. In everyday use, it's quite another matter. You will usually get much more of the "theoretical" performance of firewire, whereas USB can be slowed down by a number of things, as mentioned previously. USB also leverages the main processor for some tasks, using valuable system resources and incurring penalties if the processor is busy. Firewire is much less dependent on the processor. Overall, firewire is a much better protocol where sustained high data transfer rates are required. |
|
|
|
07/07/2006 10:52:40 AM · #9 |
Originally posted by kirbic:
Originally posted by justin_hewlett:
Originally posted by eschelar:
USB 2.0 vs using Firewire... |
I've always heard that USB 2.0 and firewire are very similar. I was told there was no advantage to using firewire over USB 2.0. Not sure if that information was accurate or not. |
By the specs, they are not very different. In everyday use, it's quite another matter. You will usually get much more of the "theoretical" performance of firewire, whereas USB can be slowed down by a number of things, as mentioned previously. USB also leverages the main processor for some tasks, using valuable system resources and incurring penalties if the processor is busy. Firewire is much less dependent on the processor. Overall, firewire is a much better protocol where sustained high data transfer rates are required. |
Smart alick. ;) Kirbic... you are soooooo dude!
|
|
|
|
07/07/2006 11:05:48 AM · #10 |
| Update the laptop drive with a 5400 Samsung or some such model. It does make a difference going from 4700 to 5400... just did it to a Toshiba I own. |
|
|
|
07/07/2006 11:10:58 AM · #11 |
Originally posted by justin_hewlett:
Originally posted by eschelar:
USB 2.0 vs using Firewire... |
I've always heard that USB 2.0 and firewire are very similar. I was told there was no advantage to using firewire over USB 2.0. Not sure if that information was accurate or not. |
The transfer rate is similar, but USB 2.0 has a burst rate of 480Mbps, whereas FireWire has a sustained rate of 400Mbps. |
|
|
|
07/07/2006 01:23:51 PM · #12 |
Originally posted by drz01:
Laptop drives operate at a slower speed than desktop drives 4500 compared to 7200 (rpm) and the desktop drives usually have a larger cache memory anywhere from 8 to 16mb. Since most external drives use desktop drives it will be faster than your internal laptop drive. |
My laptop (HP HW8000) has a 7200rpm hard drive with an 8mb cache on it...
|
|
|
|
07/07/2006 02:17:08 PM · #13 |
Thanks all for the stats...
Colema, I hadn't really thought about other things that my HD might be doing... I'd be surprised if there was significant pagefile activity with over 800MB of RAM free even when doing basic editing on 8MPix images from the 30D in Photoshop... Much more so if there was significant activity when just browsing...
Could happen though...
As far as USB vs Firewire, I think you summed it up in the last statement where you said that you haven't seen a firewire mouse...
I feel that it's these little USB things that often tend to drag down the USB speeds. I don't plug in more than one FireWire device at a time generally... I might if I were going from an HD to a DVD burner or something... A project to learn about another day I think...
Pineapple, could you elaborate on the differences that you noticed going from 4700 to 5400?
I have also tried a 5400 in my computer where the OEM one is 4500RPM... Didn't see much difference... I felt that it did get a bit hotter though... To the point where I was getting worried. Actually, I haven't noticed my CPU fan coming on lately, so I'm getting a bit suspicious... Tablet PC's often use very low voltage stuff that doesn't get anywhere near as hot as other types of laptop.
Anyhow, it will be interesting when I finally get a cable for firewire to see the difference. |
|
|
|
07/08/2006 11:57:21 AM · #14 |
Originally posted by Raziel:
Originally posted by justin_hewlett:
Originally posted by eschelar:
USB 2.0 vs using Firewire... |
I've always heard that USB 2.0 and firewire are very similar. I was told there was no advantage to using firewire over USB 2.0. Not sure if that information was accurate or not. |
The transfer rate is similar, but USB 2.0 has a burst rate of 480Mbps, whereas FireWire has a sustained rate of 400Mbps. |
IIRC, USB 2.0 has more overhead for larger files, so USB wins on smaller file trnafers, but FireWire is much better on larger file transfers.
|
|
|
|
07/08/2006 12:09:58 PM · #15 |
beyond the speed issue...
I decided to get the external hard drive only so that I could take it on trips and plug all my photos into my laptop. and DL and photos I took on a trip straight to the drive they're going to be held on.
.2
|
|
|
|
07/09/2006 01:41:05 AM · #16 |
Originally posted by eschelar:
Thanks all for the stats...
Colema, I hadn't really thought about other things that my HD might be doing... I'd be surprised if there was significant pagefile activity with over 800MB of RAM free even when doing basic editing on 8MPix images from the 30D in Photoshop... Much more so if there was significant activity when just browsing...
|
The pagefile doesn't work like that. Some things get swapped to disk regardless of how much free memory you have, because they just don't need to be residing in memory all the time.
|
|
Home -
Challenges -
Community -
League -
Photos -
Cameras -
Lenses -
Learn -
Help -
Terms of Use -
Privacy -
Top ^
DPChallenge, and website content and design, Copyright © 2001-2026 Challenging Technologies, LLC.
All digital photo copyrights belong to the photographers and may not be used without permission.
Current Server Time: 01/02/2026 05:31:58 AM EST.
