For the Fastest External Drive on a MacBook Pro Upgrade to eSATA
The fastest external hard drive interface you can get for the MacBook Pro is eSATA. The problem is eSATA is not included on the any Apple MacBook Pro so you need to get an adapter. I have been using the APIOTEK EXTREME Express34 eSATA Adapter from OWC (Other World Computing).
Standard eSATA cable (red) and Apiotek eSATA adapter
I picked up one of these eSATA adapters and a 500GB external drive with a quad interface (USB2, Firewire 400 & 800 and eSATA) from them when I first got my Apple MacBook Pro. I knew that the internal drive was going to be slow and also not big enough for heavy photo and video work.
The performance of this solution, not surprisingly, varies greatly depending on what interface you use. If you are one of those people that believe everything you read then you already know that Firewire 400 will be the slowest followed by USB2, Firewire 800 and then eSATA. Problem is USB2 never seems faster than any Firewire interfaces in any test I've ever done.
Here are the results I got.
As you can see from this test you get a remarkable performance difference considering this is the exact same drive, computer and tests. The only thing that has changed is the cable I used to connect it to the laptop.
What I find interesting is that although Firewire 800 and eSATA are very close with read speeds eSATA is over 20% faster on writing data.
;)
Unflexible common eSATA cable (red) and flexible eSATA cable from www.SATACables.com shown with eSATA adapter and external 2.5" drive in enclosure
The problem with my setup is that the eSATA Express34 adapter does not have a very solid connection to the laptop. Part of the design of the Express34 slot was to allow the adapter to slide out easily. If you have a stiff eSATA cable like most of them (show in red above) it can be tricky to keep your external drive mounted all the time.
;)
eSATA Adapter shown with flexible eSATA cable from www.SATACables.com
Today I found the solution, a flexible eSATA cable. This makes all the difference especially with a laptop. Often I found myself connecting with Firewire 800 because the cable was that much better. Now I use eSATA all the time and the card stays put in most situations.
Why you REALLY need eSATA...
Another interesting discovery was when I was doing benchmarks with more than one drive hooked up. I have several Firewire 400 drives and only one external Firewire 800 drive. No problem in theory. My MacBook Pro has not only a Firewire 400 jack but also a Firewire 800 jack. So I hooked my FW400 drives to the FW400 jack and my FW800 drive to the FW800 jack. Although they appear like different ports on the outside, once you mix Firewire 800 and 400 on the same machine your performance severely suffers.
Same external 500Gb drive hooked up via Firewire 800 with other Firewire 400 drives attached on different port
This is a remarkable difference. The same drive when attached as a Firewire 800 drive slowed down almost 75% when writing while external Firewire 400 drives were attached. Note the Firewire 400 drives are attached only on the Firewire 400 jack and the Firewire 800 drive is attached only to the Firewire 800 jack on the laptop.
;)
Same test as above but drive is attached with eSAT interface while other Firewire 400 drives are mointed
I repeated the same test as above but this time I used the eSATA cable instead of Firewire 800. Same drive just different interface.
The eSATA interface is clearly the superior interface especially if you plan on mixing Firewire 400 and 800 drives. Just imagine doing video with a firewire camera attached. By using eSATA you can really take advantage of fast drives with your laptop while editing.
On the new MacBook Pro machines Apple dropped the Firewire 400 interface. Now you can see why that was really no big deal. There are easy fixes to get a Firewire 400 drive to connect to a Firewire 800 interface with just a cable or an adapter. To drop Firewire all together on the new Macbooks makes no sense to me especially if they expect anyone to be able to edit video on them.
On a related note I guess you could buy an Express34 Firewire 800 adapter to keep your Firewire internal bus separate. This is theory would get you maximum Firewire 800 performance while still using Firewire 400 drives. With eSATA being faster and cheaper though I don't really see this as an advantage though.
Out of curiosity I also intalled a new 500Gb SATA drive in my Dell tower. I tested that was getting approximately 80Mb/sec read/write. So now you CAN get desktop drive performance with a laptop.
Please feel free to leave me comments on this page.
David Ditzler
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First of all, i am spanish, so, sorry if y make some mistakes.
It is a very interesting and usefull review, thanks
I have one problem. I have LaCie quadra (USB, FW 400, FW800 and Esata, 7200 rpm). I use it in a MBP santa rosa (basic configuration).
Quick bench said that my Lacie is correct and shows more or less the same result as you, but when I test transfering files with a chronometer, USb, FW400 and FW800 they are almost identicall, I migth it could be because my internal drive is limited to 5400rpm.
My big question is, if i work with Imovie or Final cut Expres with my proyects in the external hard drive, It will be faster than in my internal HD or at the end the final speed is the speed of my internal HD?, because if it is in that way, why use FW 800?
Do you recomend to use a 7200 rpm internal drive to improve speed with FW800? or it is a silly thing.
I hope your answer.
Thanks
arrobalobo@yahoo.es
kaylee
http://www.thinkpadonline.info
Quick bench said that my Lacie is correct and shows more or less the same result as you, but when I test transfering files with a chronometer, USb, FW400 and FW800 they are almost identicall, I migth it could be because my internal drive is limited to 5400rpm.
A - make sure you are testing with a minimal amount of drives and devices hooked up to the Mac. When I was testing I know that anything running firewire 400 would slow down the firewire 800 connection.
My drive was a 7,200 rpm drive and yes I do think they make a difference. They are noticeably faster.
Q - My big question is, if i work with Imovie or Final cut Expres with my proyects in the external hard drive, It will be faster than in my internal HD or at the end the final speed is the speed of my internal HD?, because if it is in that way, why use FW 800?
A -You should notice a difference if FCE if all your scratch media is on your external drive. The program can stay on your internal HD but keeping your media on the faster drive should help.
Q - Do you recommend to use a 7200 rpm internal drive to improve speed with FW800? or it is a silly thing.
A -Yes I would recommend a 7,200 rpm drive with FW800. You should get better performance.
Just wondering if you have explored SSDs. They're still a bit pricey, but with an esata adapter you should be able to get close to 2x the speeds you're reporting here. Finding an external solution (where you don't have to buy it piecemeal) can be tough, though. Its still early for these things, but I think 2009 is going to be a breakout year for SSDs.
This is interesting. A Firewire Bus will drop to the speed of the slowest attached device, so as you remark having a camera attached will drop the bus speed to 100 mbps [most of the cameras that I've used run @ 100 mbps]. I'm concerned by your results here when mixing FW400 and FW800 devices on a MBP.
When I a Mac Pro desktop system, which has 2 FW busses, I was always sure to put the camera on a different bus than the storage - but your results suggest that while the MBP has 2 ports, it only has a single bus.
@dbk: "A Firewire Bus will drop to the speed of the slowest attached device"
As Mr Ditzler tests in this entry show, that is untrue. In fact, I'm surprised that his setup experienced as much slow down as it did, particularly in writes.
I've been happily using esata for my audio and video drives via my macbook pro for years now and have a Venus T4s 5 bay enclosure hooked up to one of my esata ports. The one caveat that you haven't mentioned and it really irks me that this wasn't addressed with snow leopard or firmware upgrades to the macbook pros is that the esata port off the ExpressCard is not bootable!!!!! If you want to boot to an external drive you've got to use firewire or usb.
host based arbitrated comms will always be slower than peer-to-peer
http://www.usb-ware.com/firewire-vs-usb.htm
OR
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/firewire3.htm
I have the above setup and have found it to be problematic (multiple kernel panics). I was never able to get it to work reliably for any length of time. I ended up going back to FW800 when possible or USB2 when not.
Also, if you're using Snow Leopard, I don't believe this card is compatible.
So I have a MBP 2.53, 8GB RAM...just got a FW800 to use for FCP; didnt upgrade my internal, which is still 5400...since the esata solution won't work for me the only other thing that I can do is upgrade my internal to 7200, the response above mentioned that this will make a difference...I can't edit H264 1080p clips in realtime right now (choppy and skips around)...thoughts or any other solutions that people have found?
Just stumbled on your post and findings via google. Since you have proven that esata is indeed the fastest interface and many external portable drives now have esata interfaces, I wonder why no laptops have an esata port built in. I think apple should implement this in the next macbook pro revision. Over the last few years, I've found the bus-power of the firewire ports on the macbook pros to be flakey at best, so why don't we just move everything to esata and phase firewire out. If the esata ports were connected to a fast bus on the motherboard, something I think the expresscard slot isn't, then one could get some serious speed with a pair of external sata drives. It would also most likely be bootable, if not hot swappable.