Which would be faster - 1 internal SATA drive, or external (firewire) striped RAID (hardware) of 2 IDE?

Question

I have a LaCie external drive. It's 500GB, i's got 2 drives in a RAID... 1? I think is the simple striped set for performance. Anyway, it 's hooked to my PC with firewire. I'm trying to figure out if I should use that drive, or an internal SATA drive, for programs that have large temp files.

I was thinking internal would be better, but just wanted to make sure.

And yes - I do have my data backed up. :) I've lost too much stuff to take any chances.

Answer 1

Internal.

The external configuration may sound faster but it relies on shared resources.
The internal SATA has dedicated bandwidth.

If you truly want external high performance you need to have a SCSI RAID array.

regards,
Philip T

Answer 2

We don't really have enough information to warrant anything more than a guess, but truthfully, there's really no reason for anyone to tell you the answer here --- you have the system and the right thing to do is to create some tests that willl benchmark your sata vs. your Firewire RAID box. You could do this fairly easily by creating some files and copying them, or get a disk benchmarking tool and run it.

As for the numbers, well first you need to clarify what hardware you have: Firewire 400 vs 800, and PATA vs. SATA vs SATA II aka SATA 3.0.

Let's assume you have a Firewire 800 drive vs. a SATA (not a Sata 3.0) drive.

The theoretical max throughput of the interface is around 1200mbit vs the 768mbit of firewire. However, we don't know the characteristics or size of the Sata drive, and we know that you have 2 250 gig firewire drives, so it's possible that the 2 firewire drives combined with a write cache on the firewire enclosure may be able to max your firewire port, where a large SATA drive can't get close.

My bet would be that the SATA drive performs better, but again, there's really no reason to take someone else's word for it when you can test throughput for yourself.

Answer 3

If that is only a question of % Firewire is fastest than USB 2.0. although the utmost % in firewire is in basic terms 400Mb/sec as adverse to 480Mb/sec in USB 2.0, firewire is swifter because the gadgets include blunders correction chips somewhat of USB 2.0 that relies upon on the laptop's CPU to attempt this and reserves a small share of the bandwidth for blunders correction. base line if %/performance is your in common words concern bypass with firewire, else bypass with USB 2.0. that is a lot more cost-effective and the speed enormous difference isn't that huge.

Answer 4

many times those dual drives use RAID-0; please backup your data! As for the drives, external drives are almost always slower than drives attached to an internal controller.