firewire and X |
October, 04, 2002 12:54 AM |
paul_findley |
I hate to be a heretic, but I think firewire is just not ready for prime time. After upgrading to Sonnet 800MHz on my 7500, and solving freeze problems with an old firewire card and drive by replacing them with new ones (new owc card and ACOMDATA 7200rpm drive), firewire is still SLOWER than my old stock SCSI bus on the motherboard. If I install Microsoft Entourage's database on the firewire, the Entourage startup sound stutters, startup takes longer, and scrolling is choppy. From SCSI drive, it's all smooth. If I play mp3s from firwire, sound is choppy. SCSI is smooth. Same for video clips. Firewire seems to be working much better (faster) in OS 9 than in OS X. Anyone have any solutions? |
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RE: firewire and X |
October, 13, 2002 11:09 AM |
powderhaus |
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Mine works fine. it is a little slow for what firewire should be but it blows the doors off my SCSI |
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RE: firewire and X |
October, 12, 2002 3:19 PM |
paul_findley |
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krevnik; I agree the benchmarks say it's fine (I don't remember exactly, but I think I registered 20+MB/sec, which is better than my stock scsi). And when I am writing a retrospect backup file to the ACOM firewire drive, it achieves far higher throughput than to my stock scsi. But there must be something beyond the numbers for some apps. Sound still stutters from the firewire, but not from the scsi (note that this is also a known problem on some ATA/IDE interface cards, too, despite their high throughput numbers). And although I fixed my major lockup problems (similar to michael587's problem) with the new card and drive, when the machine does occasionally lock up, it is usually during a firewire write of a large hunk of data. Unfortunately, HDST's tuneup parameters don't work in OS-X, which ignores the OS 9 HDST driver, but they are working on an X-solution (got an email from them). |
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RE: firewire and X |
October, 08, 2002 12:48 PM |
krevnik |
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I remember the brand: IOGear. A little more expensive and all you get is the card (I paid 40$ for mine), but has been solid, and the company is in firm support of the Mac with their hardware. On the topic of firewire speeds, I personally have slow speeds of about 10MB/sec myself. Although I am also using the Finder to copy from a 10MB/sec SCSI bus to the drive, which is pretty darn good. Using in-RAM constructs to save to the disk is quite a bit faster, but still chokes on the CPU and system bus. 50Mhz system bus and 200- 300Mhz pre-G3 will NOT saturate firewire, not even close. Hell, my Voodoo 5 gets the same framerate no matter what resolution I use under OS 9 because my CPU and system bus are starving the card. Beige G3s can't saturate a FW bus either, so it isn't exactly the fault of Firewire, but the machine it is connected to. Still, I would prefer to get Firewire on my machine now, and then be able to get the speed benefit when I move up to a new machine in the future. (ffmpeg is rather nice when reading/writing from/to a FW HD on my machine. I was able to transcode a DivX Anime fansub to XVCD using it in under 3 hours) |
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RE: firewire and X |
October, 08, 2002 9:48 AM |
michael587 |
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Thanks for the tips, people. I tried the MacAlly card in all 3 slots with the same result (worked briefly, then a freeze) -- I returned the card this morning. Krevnik: Yes, I'd like to know the brand when you get a chance. Mike |
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RE: firewire and X |
October, 08, 2002 8:59 AM |
krevnik |
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I got a 3-port Firewire card from some brand I have to check... but no problems... Be aware that Firewire speeds do require quite a bit of CPU interaction. |
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RE: firewire and X |
October, 06, 2002 3:32 PM |
marcush |
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michael1587, though you only have 3 pci slots you should try moving the card around to see if it works best in a particular slot. Under 10.1.5 I could not run my Ratoc card in slot 2. I don't know why but as soon as a FW drive was connected the system would freeze. It works fine in the other 5 slots. Under OS 9.x I had a problem with slot 5. Copies to or from my FW drive would never complete and I would get errors from disk warrior 2 saying that the drive had directory damage. It seems though that the problem that I had under 10.1.5 does not exist in 10.2.1. |
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RE: firewire and X |
October, 06, 2002 1:50 PM |
powderhaus |
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My Umax J700 G4 400 10.1.5 with a belkin firewire usb card works great. i plug an played both my firewire HD and my firewire CDRW. i just plugged them in and they poped up on the desktop. i finished burning a CD 4min after i got my burner. |
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RE: firewire and X |
October, 06, 2002 11:13 AM |
michael587 |
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I'm currently plagued by freezes when I plug my LaCie FW HD into my MacAlly FW/USB combo card (7600; Sonnet 800; 10.2.1 setup). I'd be interested in hearing examples of FireWire working at all, and working without problems on similar setups. (I've already taken note of the Ratoc example provided by MacRush; but I may also be interested in the Ratoc FW/UW SCSI combo, since I have hard-drives for both.) Thanks Mike |
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RE: firewire and X |
October, 04, 2002 7:02 PM |
powderhaus |
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i believe that the fastest SCSI is 80mega bytes per sec and firewire is advertised as 400 megabits or 40 mega bytes and i am most posotive that SCSI is still the fastest solution. So i know ATA and IDE are NOT 100/133mbs(mega bits matbe but not megabytes). SCSI just got to expencive for everyday users so Apple dropped it. but if you look at their super set up for about $8000 it has 4 SCSI drive in it. for $8000 do you realy think apple would cheap out. i dont think that ATA is ever realy used in those Cases. it goes from an ATA "cable" thats not realy ATA to firewire through a chip so its a matter of getting the right HD in the Case. i have one of the cases and its faster than old SCSI but i think it has a bum drive in it. its going at about 12 mega bytes per sec. |
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RE: firewire and X |
October, 04, 2002 4:30 PM |
marcush |
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I have a Ratoc Firewire/USB2.0 combo card in my Power Tower Pro. I also have the Sonnet G4 800 and 768MB RAM. I typically get anywhere between 32-36MB/s writes and 16-17MB/s reads to/from my FW drive. I've never seen it peak higher than that. That's close to the top speed I would get from my Initio Miles UW card. It's a 30GB Quantum Plus AS 7200rpm ATA/100 drive. The drive itself is in an OWC Mercury case with an Oxford 911 bridge board. It has been shown that the chipset on the card has a lot to do with performance. This card uses a Opti chip for the USB side and a DEC chip for Firewire. Before I got this card I was under the impression that Lucent made the fastest chips for Firewire cards, but I'd previously had a CompUSA combo card with Lucent chips for both buses and it was dog slow on the Firewire side. The best write speed I could get out of it was 15MB/s and 4MB/s reads. This was dissapointing to say the least. |
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RE: firewire and X |
October, 04, 2002 1:04 PM |
krevnik |
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Well, I hate to be an anti-heretic, but I think Firewire is ready for prime-time. Don't blame the tech itself for poor implementation of it. If I implement a network protocol and manage to bring down a network with my implementation, does it mean the protocol itself is flawed? On the 'wrapper' issues, the bridge chips used are not the limiters, the ATA/100 or ATA/133 bus (100MB/sec, 133MB/sec) is. But wait, the Firewire bus is the limiter at 50MB/sec then! Oh but wait, HDs can't saturate 50MB/sec unless you are shelling out big-bucks. So in the case of FW HDs, the drive itself is the limiting factor in speed. I personally haven't had any problems with Firewire speeds, and it has been faster than SCSI has been for me to an extent (a few MB/sec faster, but not the 30-40MB/sec advertised). However, my problem is that my CPU cannot actually get close to handling the flow control on such a file-copy massacre which saturates my SCSI bus, the cpu, and possibly the system bus. However, a G4 upgrade card really helps here. |
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RE: firewire and X |
October, 04, 2002 12:48 PM |
paul_findley |
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That's the state of matters today (IDE, although ACARD makes ide-scsi and firewire-scsi bridges, I think). Does that mean that "native" firewire devices were never made because of lack of economies of scale? Maybe performance could have been better. |
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RE: firewire and X |
October, 04, 2002 1:51 AM |
avit |
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Pardon my complete ignorance about Firewire, but isn't the Firewire interface on most devices simply a "wrapper" for an ATA/IDE device? Maybe not for all devices, but I seem to recall reading that somewhere... i.e. Firewire plug on the outside, ATA (or SCSI or whatever?) inside. |