Moving from USB 2.0 to firewire 800

When it comes to external hard drives, have any of you noticed a significant performance increase in read/write speeds moving from a USB 2.0 to Firewire 800 enclosure?

It's about $100 for en express card, another $150 to source the Firewire 800 RAID enclosure I want. I am not sure the cost can justify the performance increase since I'm not noticing it much now. Lightroom can slow a bit but I have a massive catalogue.

Anyone that feels they get 10 horse from an oil change in their car need not reply.

I wonder if a SATA enclosure would be your ticket.

eta:
It says Sata 2.0 (3 Gb/s)
http://www.newegg.com …aspx?Item=N82E1​6817121913

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Yeah I would go with SATA HW RAID card too -- I have one in my Linux server. Get the PCIe cards if your MOBO supports. PCI-X cards work in PCI slots but at a reduced speed. I would also stick with well know brands such as: Adaptec, 3Ware or LSI. They are a but pricey $300+ but have the HW RAID and 64MB+ buffers. Some I think have 256MB buffer.

I didn't do firewire but I went from USB to eSATA and I've been back to USB since the ExpressCard adapter took a dump on me. I thought I noticed an improvement with the eSATA at first but in daily usage, I don't see problems plus I have access to my headphone jack again. The USB tethered external is my working storage drive. I access it regularly throughout a given day.

I wasn't clear enough. I have a laptop with a mini expresscard. eSATA cards are available for $25 easy. External dives with eSATA are easy to find, but a raid array is a bit more of a search. Up to 3 times the speed is nice.

I'd like this enclosure:

http://www.ncix.com …merican%20Media​%20Systems

Add a $25 34mm mini expresscard eSATA.

Ok I'm stoked now. And I now see that Transcend's 16gb mini expresscard Solid State Drive is $110 now. I'm sure CS3 would see it as a nice fast scratch disk, but I'd have to unplug my external drive and plug it into the USB port.

Excellent answers guys.

So I bought that enclosure and a 34mm eSata II expresscard (3 Gpbs!!!!!).

I have 2 Seagate barracudas @ 7200 rpm. I have two partitions each for 4 drive letters. all the same size. 450, 450, 50, 50. The two 50gb partitions are on different drives. I will have my scratch disk on one and my OS swap file on the other. This frees up my OS drive and delegates the two 7200 rpm drives to handle massive memory swap. That with my 4gb of RAM should make my XPs pretty quick for post processing.

I decided against raid and will back between the two 450 partitions. Once my images fill the 450 partitions, I can move up from there to 1tb drives. This solves the laptop hard drive restriction quite handily. eSata II is incredibly fast.

Amazing, you are getting full desktop drive performance in a laptop now?

Wow..

Yep. I have 3 7200rpm drives running now. I can upgrade to 10000 rpm if I so choose now.

eSata II is the new black. Firewire = slow. USB 2.0 = buh bye.

I wonder if my aged notebook can handle a full speed esata card.. likely not. It has no "expresscard" that's certain. Maybe Cardbus.

PCMCIA sata II at 3Gbps.


http://www.satacard.co​m/pc112.html

I just looked up the speeds on the specs, and Cardbus would only take a minor hit over the SATA interface, and since drives aren't that fast anyway, even cardbus would mean pretty much full speed.

Cardbus runs at a maximum speed of 133Megabytes/sec.
SATA runs at a maximum speed of 150Megabytes/sec. (doubled to 300 with SATA II 3G )
PATA runs at a maximum speed of 133Megabytes/sec.
FireWire800 runs at a maximum speed of 100Megabytes/sec.

danpass ftw.

cosworth wrote in post #4973656
danpass ftw.

lol

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cosworth wrote in post #4973408
So I bought that enclosure and a 34mm eSata II expresscard (3 Gpbs!!!!!).

I have 2 Seagate barracudas @ 7200 rpm. I have two partitions each for 4 drive letters. all the same size. 450, 450, 50, 50. The two 50gb partitions are on different drives. I will have my scratch disk on one and my OS swap file on the other. This frees up my OS drive and delegates the two 7200 rpm drives to handle massive memory swap. That with my 4gb of RAM should make my XPs pretty quick for post processing.

I decided against raid and will back between the two 450 partitions. Once my images fill the 450 partitions, I can move up from there to 1tb drives. This solves the laptop hard drive restriction quite handily. eSata II is incredibly fast.

Have you try turning off virtual memory completely? My PC has 4GB with virtual memory off. I also have the /PAE switch and runs MUCH better. It already had the /3GB switch but for some reason the /PAE made a world of difference.