FireWire 400 only 6 MB/s

[OS923]

I just used FireWire 400 for the first time with OS 9.2.2 G4 MDD.
I have only 6 MB/s reading as well as writing.
Is that normal?

It's a Kangaroo HFU-EB35I with a WD Caviar WD600BB.

http://www.heisei-systems.eu/assets/products/Media-Storage/HDD-Enclosure/3.5-inch/HFU-EB35I/datasheet/HFU-EB35I.pdf

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/legacy/Legacy.asp?Model=WD600BB

If I use it with XP and USB 2 then I have a speed of 27 MB/s.

[Philgood]

Definitely not normal. You should get slightly better speed than with usb2...

[geforceg4]

not in os9!

xp supports usb2.0
os9 does not

[ziggy29]

There is a problem somewhere.  Even on my ancient PM 7600 (albeit with a G3), my old internal 50-pin SCSI drive gives me throughput of better than 7 MB/s (OS 9.1).  And with an HDD connected to an IDE controller on that machine, I'm getting over 25 MB/s (and over 30 MB/s with an SSD). 

I can't believe an MDD with FW400 shouldn't beat that. 

[GaryN]

This would not be the first external enclosure heard of that worked fine on USB and not Firewire. Do you have anything else FW around to double-check the MDD FW port with? My money's on the enclosure, but it helps to be sure…

[OS923]

I tried it also with a 40 GB HD.
Now I use it with a 120 GB HD.
I tried it with my XP computer with a FW 400 PCI card and it read at 37 MB/s.
Still the MDD reads at 6 MB/s.

[OS923]

There are more people who experienced slow FW:

https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/16757-anyone-still-use-firewire-drives/

Got some other FW external drives, including a 2.5" self-powered unit. I can use them on the 7500's runing 8.6 -- so sad they won't go over 2.5 MB/s

[OS923]

I'm using FireWire extension version 2.8.7.

[OS923]

It has a CD with a software installer.
The text on the CD says for W98-XP and Mac but it has only a Windows format with Windows software.

[GaryN]

I'm using FireWire extension version 2.8.7.

There are two FireWire extensions: "FireWire Enabler 2.8.7" and "FireWire Support 2.8.7"
Do you have both installed and enabled?

I tried it also with a 40 GB HD.
Now I use it with a 120 GB HD.
I tried it with my XP computer with a FW 400 PCI card and it read at 37 MB/s.
Still the MDD reads at 6 MB/s.

What I asked was: Do you have anything else that connects with FireWire…like a camera, another Mac, something other than the drive enclosure in order to verify that the port on the computer is good?

[OS923]

The speed of 6 MB/s is the speed of Finder copy.
This is not the same as the maximum read speed.
I read from the external HD with a REALbasic program at 23 MB/s.

Is it possible to increase the speed of Finder copy?

What is the most reliable speed test program?

[OS923]

Apparently, the problem with Finder copy is that it is single threaded synchronous I/O. So it asks to read one block, waits until it is done, then it asks to write the block, waits until it is done and so on.

Has anyone experience with this program:

CopyThru v3.1 makes duplicates of HFS volumes with the option of segmenting the copy through a fixed (or simply not-removed) volume. In other words, it is a multi-pass block copier for removable media. It is particularly useful for making backups of valuable data stored on Zip, EzFlyer, Jaz, and other carts. CopyThru can also perform high-speed direct disk-to-disk copies.

CopyThru fills up one or more hard drives (or as much of it as you permit to be filled-up) with blocks, ejects the source volume, requests the destination volume, and then repeats until the copy is completed. It is heavily multi-threaded and uses asynchronous I/O so is much faster than Finder-dragging.

CopyThru can copy almost anything; including disks with scratches, ball-point marks, footprints, and even pin-holes.

Many options are supported.

Although v3.1 is now shareware it is quite inexpensive.

Ben Hellstrom
[email protected]

[GaryN]

The speed of 6 MB/s is the speed of Finder copy.
This is not the same as the maximum read speed.
I read from the external HD with a REALbasic program at 23 MB/s.

Oh…Now that you finally mention it. It's something different entirely, isn't it?

[OS923]

If I boot the PC with XP and MacDrive while the external HD is switched on (connected via USB or FW), then the PC will hang during startup.
Today I found the solution: format the HD with 2 partitions.

[OS923]

I reformatted the FW HD on an unsupported MDD with OS 9.
Now Finder copy works at 18 MB/s on the supported MDD with OS 9.

[IIO]

that is still not very fast. firewire is not at all a bottleneck. i have disks which do 34 read/write max and i experience 33 with them pover firewire 400, other disk which can do 70 reach the fw limit and do some 46.

in a real life situation copying stuff should easily be faster than with USB - even under windows OS.