External Firewire vs. Internal SATA on Intel mini...

[tjwett]

howdy.

the stock 80GB drive in my Core Duo mini filled up the first day i got the machine. i've had to offload my iTunes library and a bunch of other stuff onto external drives to free up space. i'm considering using my 200GB external Maxtor Firewire drive as the main system drive to simplify and give me some more breathing room.

and before you suggest it, i can't simply use the external as storage. 90% of my files that are demanding all this space are audio and sample libraries that must reside in specific locations on the main drive or in my library. aliases and/or sylinks are not sufficient either.

so anyway, i'm wondering what to expect performance wise from an external 7200RPM firewire drive compared to an internal 5400RPM SATA drive. i know the I/O of SATA is faster than firewire, 1.5GB/sec compared to 400MB/sec, but would the slower 5400RPM speed bring it down to an even playing field? i'd much rather just throw a 7200RPM 2.5" SATA into the mini but the biggest one available is 100GB so that doesn't really help me very much. i know people with PPC minis can benefit greatly from booting from an external fast HD but do you think i'd actually see a performance hit going from the internal SATA to external firewire? thanks for any help.

 

[velocityg4]

You shouldn't notice a performance hit. Though the SATA is a faster interface than firewire that 5400 RPM drive comes nowhere close to maxing out firewire let alone SATA. The 7200 RPM external will not even max out firewire except possibly burst transfers, but sustained transfers from either drive will not overwhelm firewires 400 megabits per second.

one question though. With whatever programs you use, can you change the preference settings for your files default locations? Like with itunes you can change your music folder location to another drive/folder. Anyways the 3.5" hard drive will make for a faster system.

 

[tjwett]

You shouldn't notice a performance hit. Though the SATA is a faster interface than firewire that 5400 RPM drive comes nowhere close to maxing out firewire let alone SATA. The 7200 RPM external will not even max out firewire except possibly burst transfers, but sustained transfers from either drive will not overwhelm firewires 400 megabits per second.

one question though. With whatever programs you use, can you change the preference settings for your files default locations? Like with itunes you can change your music folder location to another drive/folder. Anyways the 3.5" hard drive will make for a faster system.

thanks for the input. regarding the file locations; in some cases you can point the app or plugin to look wherever you want but in most cases you cannot.

 

[miniConvert]

Is it really better to have an external firewire 400 drive rather than an external USB 2.0 one? Isn't USB 2.0 theoretically faster?

 

[tjwett]

Is it really better to have an external firewire 400 drive rather than an external USB 2.0 one? Isn't USB 2.0 theoretically faster?

well, in terms of maximum possible speed yes, USB is spec'd slightly higher but the difference is that Firewire offers a steady 400Mb/sec throughput while USB 2 fluctuates depending on what you're doing so i believe that for real-world use (especially using it as a system drive) you'd probably see better results from Firewire. but you could potentially get faster speeds from USB 2 when doing stuff like copying a single large file. also, you can't boot from USB drives, only Firewire.

 

[jeremy.king]

howdy.
aliases and/or sylinks are not sufficient either.

Care to share why symlinks woudn't solve your issue? Symlink the entire folder for simplicity, this is how I moved my iTunes library such that I could share it with my wife's account.

 

[tjwett]

Care to share why symlinks woudn't solve your issue? Symlink the entire folder for simplicity, this is how I moved my iTunes library such that I could share it with my wife's account.

symlinks don't always work. i'm not talking about iTunes, other audio apps and plugins like Ableton Live and Logic Pro don't recognize symlinks for source audio files. if i could i would.

 

[jeremy.king]

symlinks don't always work. i'm not talking about iTunes, other audio apps and plugins like Ableton Live and Logic Pro don't recognize symlinks for source audio files. if i could i would.

Are you creating them in Terminal or finder? Aliases (in finder) are NOT the same as links created using ln in Terminal. I have NEVER seen the case where the latter wouldn't work for ANY program. If you have problems with symbolic (-s) you could try hard links. To make life easy, I would suggest linking the folder that contains the audio files rather than trying to link each individual audio file.

 

[generik]

I think links should work just fine. Finder literally have no way of telling that a link is actually a link and not another folder. It is displayed in the exact same way!

 

[tjwett]

Are you creating them in Terminal or finder? Aliases (in finder) are NOT the same as links created using ln in Terminal. I have NEVER seen the case where the latter wouldn't work for ANY program. If you have problems with symbolic (-s) you could try hard links. To make life easy, I would suggest linking the folder that contains the audio files rather than trying to link each individual audio file.

i've been up and down this road many times. i promise, it's not possible. i know how to make symlinks and hard links, i've been a mac tech by day for the past 5 years. realtime audio apps are quite picky, you'd be surprised how much stuff just doesn't work as you'd expect.

 

[tjwett]

I think links should work just fine. Finder literally have no way of telling that a link is actually a link and not another folder. It is displayed in the exact same way!

not dealing with the Finder. these apps have their own file browsers completely separate from the Finder.

 

[jeremy.king]

i've been up and down this road many times. i promise, it's not possible. i know how to make symlinks and hard links, i've been a mac tech by day for the past 5 years. realtime audio apps are quite picky, you'd be surprised how much stuff just doesn't work as you'd expect.

I'll have to take your word for it, but I still think its possible. Good luck with your external drive search.

 

[SilentPanda]

What apps are you referring to? I don't know anything about Garageband let alone any other audio apps but if you state the audio app somebody else here might be able to help you out with the location of the files problem. I don't know if it can be gotten around but it never hurts to try.

 

[milo]

What sample libraries are you using? I use a ton of samples and I don't think any need to be on the boot drive. In fact, you get much better performance if you put them on a second drive.

I use Logic, and I've never come across samples I couldn't move to a different drive. Which ones can't you move?

 

[howesey]

Is it really better to have an external firewire 400 drive rather than an external USB 2.0 one? Isn't USB 2.0 theoretically faster?

With my WD drive, Activity Monitor measures twice the speed using FW over USB. FW also feels a lot faster.