Firewire 800 speeds between Hard drives

[The-Pro]

Good Evening,

I am currently copying roughly 1TB of movies from one external FW 800 drive to another external FW800 drive. When I copy the files to an internal drive speeds are 80-84MB/s. The maximum since firewire is only transferring one way.
However when copying from one external to the other speeds are 38-43MB/s. Each drive is connected to a separate FW 800 port on the Mac Pro. Given that the Mac Pro has 4 FW 800 ports why does the system have to split the bandwidth in half?
I thought that the point in having separate ports is that you get full bandwidth in either direction at the same time?!

 

[derbothaus]

You only have 1 FW controller (bus). 4 ports - 1 chip. Super sad, I know. It's a sad sad hub.
I got a simple 1x lane eSATA card and vary my case electronics between SATA, USB 2, and FW400/800.

 

[The-Pro]

You only have 1 FW controller (bus). 4 ports - 1 chip. Super sad, I know. It's a sad sad hub.
I got a simple 1x lane eSATA card and vary my case electronics between SATA, USB 2, and FW400/800.

Ahhh ok, I was guessing it must be something in that direction. It really is a sad hub, so much space and they only put one in. What a shame. Taking 6-7 hours to move the 980GB should be around 3
I was considering that bud I hardly use externals so its not worth it.