Is FireWire 800 really faster than SATA II for HDDs/SSDs?

[Juicy Box]

Yeah, that’s why I specified that this has all been with HDDs, not SSDs lol.

Compounding the issue is probably that you were using the 2.5", which are generally much slower than the power hungry 3.5" SATAIII HDDs.

If using a newer 3.5" SATAIII HDD over USB, you could see much higher sequential read speeds that what you have been getting with your 2.5".

Just FYI, I wouldn't get too hung up on max sequential transfer speeds when it comes to USB flash drives.

For a lot of people, the small file random speeds are much more important than the sequential speeds.

This is very true, it totally depends on what one does with the drive.

You can just look at the speed tests posted above and see that the random test results of the FW800 SSD were much better than the internal SATAII HDD results, and almost on par with the internal SATAII SSD.

If someone was mostly dealing with random reads and writes, really fast sequential speeds alone doesn't really matter.

 

[Amethyst1]

If someone was mostly dealing with random reads and writes, really fast sequential speeds alone doesn't really matter.

I mean, when do seq speeds alone matter?

 

[EugW]

Isn't the 8-core 3.0GHz Mac Pro 2,1 a 2007 model? I ask because the 2008 Mac Pro is a different model than the 2006 and 2007 models (the 2007 being really a firmware upgraded 2006).

Yes you're right. However, I (incorrectly) said 2008 because it has a manufacture date of 2007 week 52, so it wouldn't have been delivered until 2008.

Actually, because of that, it's a bit of a unicorn. It has a different BootROM than what everyone else has. The usual MacPro2,1 BootROM is MP21.007F.B06 and that's the BootROM that people use to upgrade their MacPro1,1 to 2,1 like I did with my other 2006 MacPro1,1 (that someone gave to me for some beer ). I installed 2 x quad-core 2.33 GHz Xeon E5345 in that one. Cost me under US$20 from eBay.

However, my 2 x quad-core 3.0 GHz Xeon X5365 MacPro2,1 BootROM is MP21.007F.B08.