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Finally, my new eSATA-expresscard34 arrived, an “Inside hide AKE Express To eSATA Card” (eBay).

Now, my external HDD enclosure (Lacie, but without FW800) may not only be connected via USB and FireWire, but also via eSATA. So to show it does make sense to give away daisy-chaining for this, I benchmarked and compared all these connections.

Daisy-chaning is the ability to connect more than one firewire device on the same port. Instead of using an (USB-)hub, nearly every firewire device has two ports, acting as in- and output. Using this technologie, you can connect up to 16 devices using one single port.

For testing I choose the Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ, a not-that-new 1TB SATA-HDD with 7200RPM and 32mb Cache.
It’s connected to my MacBook Pro 15″ 5,1 (Unibody, Late 2008), equipped with a Corsair P-256 SSD and Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.3, using Xbench 1.3 as the benchmarking-tool.

Because a pictures says just more than a thousand words, here you go with the results:

As I expected, USB is the slowes, followed by FireWire. eSATA is the fastest of all connections. Here the Xbench points altogether:

Please do not forget: This is always the same HDD in the same enclosure. The only thing which differs is the connection!

My conclusion: Big files and TimeMachine-Backups will be transferred by eSATA only, from now on! And buying the card for a mere 8.40€ was defenitly worth it! So, in all day use, what does all this mean? Well, copying 6.66GB (seriously, size of the 10.6 install-dvd) takes about 70-80 seconds.

Mac OS X does not have any problem with this card, it’s bound into the system without installing any drivers and even get’s a little icon in the menubar at the top:

A little gimmick: simplePower recognises the card and shows the status of the connected HDD:  (2: active)

•  German

Tags: Benchmark, eSATA, FireWire 400, Inside hide AKE Express To eSATA Card, Lacie, MacBook Pro, Samsung Spinpoint F3, simplePower, USB 2.0

Dieser Eintrag wurde am Tuesday, 15. June 2010 um 20:00 verfasst und in Apple, Mac, OS X eingeordnet. Sie können die Antworten mit diesem RSS 2.0 Feed verfolgen. Sie können einen Kommentar verfassen, oder einen Trackback von Ihrer Website verlinken.