Firewire or eSata?
 

I have a G-Raid hooked up to my Mac via Firewire. I'm curious if there would be any advantage to hooking it in via eSata. I have been told that's the way to go so I'm wondering if there's something I'm missing.

If you've got it hooked up via FW800 and you've got say a camera (or other FW400 only device) attached via FW400, the entire FW buss slows to 400mps so the eSATA would bring up performance in this case for sure.

Hmmm... well the only things I have attached are the G-Raid via Firewire and my SD card reader. That's it. Is that slowing it down at all?

I'll wait for someone more experienced than I to weigh in on this. PERSONALLY, I've never seen an SD reader that used FW but I have never used SD for anything but photos up till now.

I think I meant USB.

Two completely different busses. All good.

Awesome! Thanks!

I do have an CF reader that is FW 400 and it does slow the bus down.

As far as speed of FW800 versus Esata, I have yet to see a real world example where cheap Esata crads is actually faster than FW800.

I am talking about LaCie, WD and G-raid with included cards or sub $100.00 cards. I have never seen even close to 2Mb/sec on 8 core MP or MBP's.

However my 12TB Promise Raid system (Megabucks) with Atto SAS card (list about $1,000.00) blows them out of the water 650MB/sec or better (multiply by 8 for Mb/sec).

Fiber channel is even faster.

eSata is much faster than Firewire. It won't affect capture speed but it will affect moving files around and exporting to Quicktime Files from the FCP timeline. Since rendering and compression are typically compute intensive, I would not expect noticable improvement at all.

Depending on which model Mac you have, you may have to add an interface card to get eSata connectivity. This introduces another device in the chain and if it's from a manufacturer different from your drives and you have problems, finger pointing ensues. So, if you have to add eSata capability to your Mac, you may want to get the drives and the card from the same manufacturer. I use Caldigit and they stand behind their stuff like nobody I have ever known. Awesome. YMMV.