firewire-800 vs 400 in docked/undocked t42 and t22

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zver17 · #1 Post by **zver17** » Mon Mar 07, 2005 11:56 am

i am weighting up between firewire-800 and 400 for conecting a large (200-300GB) external HDD to a t42 (via a firewire-800 pcmcia card, which i assume will work in both a t42 and t22, both undocked and docked-II using the dock pcmcia slot).

I wonder whether many people have tried the 800 firewire interface and wherther it would offer a noticeable benefit for a t42-external HDD combination (maybe the bottleneck would be elsewhere??)

many thanks!

Leeper · #2 Post by **Leeper** » Mon Mar 07, 2005 6:14 pm

Not really any bottle necks from the Thinkpad side. I run a Firewire 800 card connected to a LaCie drive that screams. One bottle neck would be the internal HD of the thinkpad if you are going to try and copy data between an external source and the internal drive over FW but if you have the 60Gb 7200rpm drive you should be fine

zver17 · #3 Post by **zver17** » Mon Mar 07, 2005 7:08 pm

Leeper, thanks for info. btw, which lacie drive do you have? i've been reading some web reviews and they claim some of these drives get really hot. i also read about high failure rates in external HDD's in general - what was your experience?

Leeper · #4 Post by **Leeper** » Mon Mar 07, 2005 7:16 pm

I have a couple of them.

My main backup is the 1Tb Bigger Disk. It works fine and is very fast, does get a bit warm but I have it on the floor and it does not go anywhere with me.

I also have the 60Gb pocket drive which does get warm but no more so that any other 60Gb 7200rpm drive.

Both have worked just fine for over a year.

#5 Post by **RonS** » Mon Mar 07, 2005 7:20 pm

I also run LaCie drives (D2 Extreme 1TB).

PCMCIA: 65MB/sec sustained, using LaCie firewire-800 card plugged into the Dock's PCMCIA slot

PCI: 70 MB/sec sustained, using a LaCie firewire-800 card plugged into the Dock's 32-bit PCI slot.

Bencharked with HDTach (free hard drive benchmark)

zver17 · #6 Post by **zver17** » Mon Mar 07, 2005 7:27 pm

thanks a lot for the info. I assume you are using the lacie firewire card with 2 FW800 ports and 1 FW400 ports. Is it the case that the FW400 connection is more or less twice slower than FW800, as theoreticaly expected from the specs? thanks a lot!

#7 Post by **RonS** » Mon Mar 07, 2005 7:55 pm

The FireWire400 PCI card runs at 40MB/sec with the LaCie drive. I haven't tested it with the PCMCIA, but I suspect that it's the same.

The bottleneck seems to be the interface, not the drive or the bus, except on the PCMCIA FW800 with the D2E

zver17 · #8 Post by **zver17** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 4:12 pm

i read on lacie's website http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10491 that their "extreme" edition FW800 HDD's give a further 20-25MB/sec over 'standard' FW800 (80-90MB/sec vs 60MB/sec).

The speeds reported by RonS for an 'extreme' lacie drive (65-70MB) are, as expected, below the lacie 'up to' clams, but still nearly twice the speed of FW400 (40MB/sec).

I am wondering whether a 'non-extreme' FW800 lacie drive would give much advantantage over a standard FW400 drive. Lacie reports ~55MB/sec for the 'non-extreme' drive, but if this is its 'theoretical' maximum then its practical performance may not be that much better then FW400 (40MB/sec).

I also seen a CNET review http://fineliving.com.com/LaCie_d2_Hard ... tag=glance says: "The Lacie d2 Extreme's performance in our 400MB folder and 1.9GB large-file copy tests was exceptional. It averaged 10.2MB per second with USB 2.0, 11.4MB per second with IEEE 1394a, and a whopping 12MB per second with FireWire 800.". whats so whooping about these differences?

Does anybody know whether FW800 HDD of other brands (eg, Iomega) are closer in speed to the 'extereme' lacie or a 'non-extreme' lacie. If somebody has such drives, and are able/willing to let me know their practical trasnfer speeds, I would be very grateful!

I am going to be moving >10-50GB of files on a weekly (maybe even daily) basis, so these speeds will matter quite a lot.

thanks in advance for any info!

#9 Post by **RonS** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 12:45 am

If you want speed, don't get the triple interface. Go for the Bigger Disk Extreme with firewire-only interface (model 300874). We have lots of LaCie drives, and the triple interface drives are MUCH slower (10MB/sec is typical). They use different internal chipsets.

A good source is TechOnWeb.com. I've ordered two of them for $800 each, almost $200 cheaper than going to LaCie direct.

Side note: The Bigger Disk Extremes bencharks at 65-70MB/sec when running with the LaCie PCMCIA Firewire-800 card on my Thinkpad T42p. Plug the same card (and drive) into a brand new Dell Latitute, and we got 17MB/sec. I suspect that the Latitude doesn't support Cardbus. Just a guess.

zver17 · #10 Post by **zver17** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 11:18 am

wow - thanks for that info!

i cant believe a company can advertise 2 products as having the same specs but with real performances different by a factor of 7!

I think the Bigger Disk Extreme might be beyond my means at the moment, but the Big Disk Extreme series look about right. Both are solely FW400/800, so is it safe to assume that they use the same chipsets and achieve comparable speeds of 60-70MB/sec?

Its intriguing that some laptops cannot take advantage of the 70MB/sec capability. I use a T42 (NOT p) - am I safe?

also, I have some desktops that I may also use with the HDD. They currently have FW400, so I would need a PCI card, right? But in view of your experience with the Latitude, how could I check that they will support cardbus?

many thanks! this has been a very informative (at least for me) thread!

zver17 · #11 Post by **zver17** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 6:23 pm

I just benchmarked the 7200/60GB T42 drive using HDTach (long bench) and it reports:
burst speed 93.7MB/s
average read - 32MB/sec
random access 14.4ms.
the sequential read speed declined from 40MB/s to 20MB/sec for 60GB (not sure what that means).

just curious whether this is consistent with other T42's out there - I noticed on some data-reading programs my TP seems to be running slower than previously...

also, from the specs (ave read speed) it seems the FireWire800 Lacie drives will run as fast or faster than the Hitachi?

#12 Post by **RonS** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 9:08 pm

The Big Disk Extreme should be as fast as the Bigger Disk Extreme. And the Thinkpad's internal 7200/60GB T42 drive (probably the Hitatchi 7K60) is much slower than either one. If you T42 has the 7K60, having a T42 or T42p won't make a bit of difference in hard drive performance.

Results of HDTach:
7K60 - Between 20 and 40MB/sec, depending on block read size. Burst speed is 91.8MB/sec, a number which doesn't relate to real-world performance in my opinion. The performance bottleneck appears to be the 7K60 drive itself.

LaCie on PCMCIA: Hits 64 MB/sec and maintains it for all data read sizes. Burst rate is 77.3 MB/sec. The bottleneck is the interface, not the drive.

LaCie on PCI card (in the Dock) maintains 70 MB/sec for all data read sizes, with a burst rate of 81.4MB/sec.

The LaCie drive will work with FW400, but expect rates between 35-40 MB/sec, not much faster than the T42's internal 7K60 hard drive. [/img]

zver17 · #13 Post by **zver17** » Fri Mar 11, 2005 10:45 am

i ordered the 400GB big disk extreme and FW800 card... in the meantime, does this card require a power adapter when used in the T42 PCMCIA slot?

zver17 · #14 Post by **zver17** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 7:25 pm

I ended up purchasing the 400GB Big Disk Extreme (FW400/800), but am having difficulties formatting it (using Disk Managment on WinXP, T42 connected via a FW400 card that I know works, since I use it with a DVD burner).

The drive IS recognised and all (eg, in Device Manager shows trhe correct specs), but at the very end of formatting (when 100% complete) an error box pops up: "the drive was NOT formatted sucesfully". If I then try to use the drive via WinExplorer it says "drive not formatted - do you want to fomat it now?" and the story repeats itself.

I read in the help docs that the drive come pre-formatted for a Mac - I wonder if this is the cause for the problem, although the help just says to reformat using WinXP Disk Management utility.

I wonder whether other Lacie HDD users have encountered such a problem and if so how was it resolved? thanks in advance

konuk · #15 Post by **konuk** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 10:28 pm

zver17:

I have one 500G Extreme and one old 250G firewire only extrenal drives. They both work well. I formatted them both with Windows XP Disk Manager.

I recently purchased Iomega USB/Firewire 250G external drives. They came fromatted to Fat32. I re-fomatted one three times to NTFS. Every time I reconnected the drive, Windows reported it corrupt or unformatted. I called Iomega and got all sorts of funny explanations (my power line ise not up to spec or I should power down the drive before shutting down windows etc!). They wanted $25 to ship me a replacement, I returned the three Iomega drives back to the vendor. The vendor replaced them with Lacie 250G drives. I have not yet tested them. I will post when do.

Regards;

I. Konuk

zver17 · #16 Post by **zver17** » Tue Apr 05, 2005 12:50 am

finally got the replacement BigDisk as the original was defective (didnt format). Connecting via Lacie-FW800 card on the T42 PCMCIA slot I get 75MB/sec transfer rate (regardless of block size) measured using HD tach, which is great (although practical write speeds seems more like ~20MB/sec max when moving 'real' files, but thats probably since I was moving files between drives).

Interestingly, if I connect a Sony DVD-RW to the FW400 port on the Lacie card the HDD transfer rate drops to 51MB/sec even if the DVD-RW is inactive (but turned on). A bit disappointing (obviously I expected some slowdown if both were actively transfering data, but the DVD-RW just sitting there should not make that much difference IMO)

Annoyingly, when I pulled the external power adapter out of the Lacie PCMCIa card (to test whether the external power is needed), the whole setup crashed severely -
(i) first the BigDisk looked like it switched off (blue lite went off) but it still displayed in windows explorer.
(ii) Then WinXP froze, and when I restarted an external screen connected to the T42 looked totally messed up (weird colours). Another restart fixed the problem (I was worried the video carde got grilled).
(iii) I had Thunderbird email and Firefox browser opened at the time. The firefox profile got obliterated (bookmark file emptied), whereas the thunderbird could connect to an existing profile (although the local folder files were still there). thankfully I had backups and only lost a couple of recent bookmarks.

so I guess I wount be pulling the external power out of the Lacie card for a while. I am intrigued, since people report using this card without the power adapter with no problems. I also noticed when using the card without the power and playing CD's, WinMediaPlayer also crashes very regularly. maybe I have a defective Lacie PCMCIA card?? a bit of coincidence then, since I also originally received a defective LAcie BigDisk (separate shipments). Could the PCI power management option have anything to do with this problem?

thanks in advance

zver17 · #17 Post by **zver17** » Tue Apr 05, 2005 5:13 pm

bump ... Could the PCI power management option have anything to do with this problem? thanks in advance.

Leon · #18 Post by **Leon** » Tue Apr 05, 2005 7:14 pm

I COULD.... PCI Power management has given me trouble with Wireless WAN Cards.

zver17 · #19 Post by **zver17** » Thu Apr 07, 2005 2:57 pm

on the other side ... could any harm arise from disabling the PCI power management?

I also read on this forum about different ways of doing it - via bios or via windows. which way (if any) is better?

thanks in advance

Leon · #20 Post by **Leon** » Thu Apr 07, 2005 4:44 pm

Do it via Windows... no harm will come.. I've run this way for years....

firewire-800 vs 400 in docked/undocked t42 and t22

firewire-800 vs 400 in docked/undocked t42 and t22

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