ok quick question.
If adding an additional HD.
what would be faster?
an Internal IDE ata/133 7200 RPM drive
or a external Firewire drive?
Not enough information given. You give some critical specs for the IDE drive but only the interface for the firewire drive.
Note also that the “firewire drive” is probably an IDE drive with a firewire interface attached.
External drives mean more desk clutter, so unless you really need portablity, I’d go for an internal unit.
He was asking which was faster…not less clutterful.
I’m not really up on the new technology, but the fastest Firewire drive enclosure I saw in a quick net hunt promised 35MB/s, while ATA-133 seems to be capable of up to 133MB/s. So assuming your machine has the hardware to handle it, the internal drive would be the fastest solution.
They are working on a Firewire 2 protocol (1394b) – I don’t know if it’s out yet, but at its advertised speed of 1Gb/sec, it should be roughly comparable with ATA-133.
True, but the clutterfullication issue should not be ignored. The speed differences are at best trivial (for the reason 3waygeek pointed out) and if an external drive gets bashed around too much, it’ll stop working and then speed will be the least of the OP’s problems.
Hmmm… if the purpose of the drive is to capture FireWire video (or other high-speed FireWire data) then an internal IDE drive is definitely faster. You can only pump so much data through the bus. Meaning if you want to record a 400Mbs stream from the camera to the FireWire hard drive (at 400Mbs), you’re in for some troubles, since FireWire doesn’t go up to 800Mbs (only 400Mbs). Unlike USB, FireWire is a peer-based network, meaning in theory you could just connect the camera to the hard drive to capture the video, but in reality neither the hard drive nor the camera have their own intelligence to do this themselves. Therefore the PC arbitrates this transfer, and you need 800Mbs instead of the 400Mbs you would need if they could talk to each other themselves.
On the other hand, if you have to independant FireWire channels, then it’s okay. Each channel has it’s own 400Mbs bandwidth. I don’t know if my PC’s $25 CompUSA firewire card with two ports are independant or shared, but I imagine my QuickSilver has independant channels. If you’re talking about a PC and have an open PCI slot, you could pick up the same cheap-o card and give you the extra channels that way.
Probably more than you wanted to know, but since you’re considering FireWire, it may be because of video and this is what you should know.
What 3waygeek said. As far as I know, there no native FireWire hard drives yet.