- #Firewire 800 to usb for data backup portable#
- #Firewire 800 to usb for data backup pro#
- #Firewire 800 to usb for data backup mac#
FireWire 400 is a pretty good choice too in most cases, but it’s modest speed advantage might not be enough to warrant paying extra for. If you’re looking for speed, FireWire 800 crushes USB on both systems in all four tests we ran. Although FireWire 400 is faster at most tasks than USB 2.0 (even though FireWire 400’s theoretical bandwidth is lower than USB 2.0’s) it isn’t always, or by much.
#Firewire 800 to usb for data backup mac#
We also ran AJA System Test’s Disk Read/Write test with a video frame size of 1920 by 1080 at 10-bit and a file size of 2GB.-Macworld Lab testing by James Galbraith and Lynn La.įrom our speed tests, it’s safe to say that Apple made the right choice switching to FireWire 800 from FireWire 400 on many Mac models. Then we copied a 2.5GB folder containing 5000 individual files and folders from the internal drive to the external drive. We copied a 1GB file from the internal hard drive to an external hard drive, then duplicated the file on the external drive. Both were tested with OS X 10.6.2 and 2GB of RAM.
#Firewire 800 to usb for data backup pro#
The test systems were a 17-inch MacBook Pro and a 3GHZ 8-Core Mac Pro. AJA System Test scores are in MBps (higher is better).
#Firewire 800 to usb for data backup portable#
We also tested a zippy little Verbatim portable drive, which was 23 percent faster than USB in the copy to external test on the MacBook Pro, 21 percent faster at the duplication test, 14 percent faster on the 5000 file copy test, 42 percent faster on the AJA write throughput, and 8 percent faster on the AJA read throughput.Ĭonnected via FireWire 800, we saw FireWire speeds 42 percent faster than USB at our copy to external test, 55 percent faster on our duplication test, 32 percent faster in the 5000 files test, and two times faster in the AJA read and write scores.Ĭopy and Duplicate scores are in minutes:seconds (lower is better).
![firewire 800 to usb for data backup firewire 800 to usb for data backup](https://www.synchrotech.com/products-storage/img/rocstor-lancer-lx-mobile-drives-usb-3.0-firewire-800-d.jpg)
The AJA write tests showed the 800 connection writing twice as many megabytes per second as the USB connection, and 49 percent faster reading. The My Book tested on the Mac Pro showed the FireWire 800 connection to be 48 percent faster than USB at copying the file to the external drive, 54 percent faster duplicating the file, and 49 percent faster copying over our 5000 files and folders. The AJA write test showed the FireWire 800 connection’s throughput at almost three times faster than the USB connected WD, with 58 percent faster read scores. Using the same hard drive, but connected to our Mac Pro, we found the FireWire 400 connection to be 19 percent faster than the USB on the copy to the external drive, 21 percent faster on both the duplication test and the copy 5000 files test, and exactly the same in terms of performance difference on the AJA read and write tests as with the MacBook Pro.Ĭomparing the FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 results on the MacBook Pro with the My Book Studio showed the FireWire 800 connection to be 35 percent faster at copying the file to the external drive, 51 percent faster duplicating that file on the external drive, and 37 percent faster copying over the 5000 files and folders. In the reading tests, however, the edge went to USB, which was nine percent faster than FireWire 400. Using AJA’s System Test application, we found the MacBook Pro’s FireWire 400 connection to be 46 percent faster than USB in the writing tests. In that test, we found the FireWire 400 transfer to be 26 percent faster than USB 2.0. To see how the different connections performed in more typical backup tasks, we copied over a 2.5GB folder containing 5000 individual files and folders.
![firewire 800 to usb for data backup firewire 800 to usb for data backup](https://www.cmple.com/content/images/thumbs/firewire-800-9-pin-to-firewire-400-4-pin-bilingual-cable-10-feet-black_nid0002796_NID0006467.jpeg)
Duplicating that file using FireWire 400 on the WD drive took 10 percent less time than when run over USB 2.0. When we connected the MacBook Pro to a 2TB Western Digital My Book Studio drive and copied a 1GB file to it from the internal hard drive, we found that it took 23 percent less time over FireWire 400 than over USB 2.0.