Firewire vs. Ultra ATA 66

[echo_pwd]

Hi,

does anybody have any comparison between Firewire and Ultra ATA 66? I am interested in buying good CD-R/W but I am not sure if I gain anything by buying external Firewire CD-R/W as opposed to having everything IDE.

I already have Firewire PCI card, which works great with Win2K-Pro. My main hard disk is 20GB UltraATA66 connected to Promise Technology UltraATA66 card.

Is it just better to go with internal IDE CD-R/W when having IDE hard disks or will it work better with firewire?

I guess that the best combination would be all 160 MB/s SCSI but it's a bit pricey.....

Any help is appreciated.

echo_pwd

[DanU]

The fastest CD writers are at... what? 16X? 20X?

Let's say 20X, so they write at 150KBps X 20, or 3MBps. This is WELL below the bandwidth of ATA33/66/100 and firewire (50MBps)

The nice thing about firewire is that it supports external devices. Is portability important to you? The downside is that external firewire drives considerably more expensive than IDE drives.

There is absolutely no reason to purchase an Ultra160 interface for a SCSI CD burner. The Ultra160 interface would be vastly under-utilized. It would also be a tremendous waste of money. It only makes sense if you have multiple hard drives transferring data simultaneously, like in a RAID setup.

Just keep it simple and buy an IDE CD burner.

[Hellmund]

Yeh you'll never use anything close to the bandwidth of either of those interfaces, also, the main advantage SCSI used to have was IDE drives having buffer underruns, now thanks to things like the burn-proof there's no advantage to SCSI burners. Better to stick with the cheaper IDE unless you want portability like DanU said.

[spidey_joe80@hotmail.com]

I totally agree that echo doesnt need to spend the extra cash on a scsi burner. But danu i pretty sure that firewire is 400mb/sec not 50. And firewire doesnt bog down the cpu when transmitting. Something to do with "bus mastering" anyway echo if u got $200 to burn get a plextor 16x10x40.

[Mungla]

Spider, if you'll notice it IS 400mb (megabits) per second. When we talk about hard disk drives, we talk in megabytes per second. I don't know what 400mb/s in MB is, but 50MB/s sounds resonable.

[Banti]

8 bits = 1 byte

400/8=50

Banti

[echo_pwd]

Thanks guys,

I did the math on the speed, I was more concerned with not involving main processor while burning CDs. SCSI is a champion there, processor sends scsi script to SCSI card for processing and then forgets about it until SCSI card signals that it's done. IDE cannot do that. I wonder how Firewire compares to this, is it processor hog or is it "smart" enough not to bug main processor for every little thing like IDE (I am exaggerating a bit).

Thanks

echo_pwd

[lazerbeam]

I got this extract from an IEEE 1394 Trade Association web site (http://www.1394ta.org/index.shtml

“IEEE 1394, the A/V Digital Interface of Choice by Gary A Hoffman, Technologist
IEEE 1394 is an international standard, low-cost digital interface that will integrate entertainment, communication, and computing electronics into consumer multimedia. Originated by Apple Computer as a desktop LAN and developed by the IEEE 1394 working group, IEEE 1394 is:
· A hardware and software standard for transporting data at 100, 200, or 400 megabits per second (Mbps).
· A digital interface-there”


Seems the transfer rate is between 100 and 400 Megabits per second so 400 megabits would be 50 Megabytes per second as the other post suggest.

However, these SCSI or IEEE 1394 I/O cards are plugged into a PCI bus, then they cannot transfer data any faster than the throughput of of the PCI bus itself. In fact what I've read is many of these speeds are "internal" read/write rates, not what is actually going over the system bus, be that PCI, ISA, S-Bus, etc.

[UKLee]

Forget the data transfer figures, is what I would suggest. Of more relevance is the actual performance and the price of the drive. I think that you'd be better of going for an IDE drive, because they are significantly cheaper and typically perform as well as, if not better than external drives.

A top-of-the-line BURN-proof drive can be bought for quite a bit less than an external FireWire drive.

[spidey_joe80@hotmail.com]

Just read the replies.
Sorry danu. http://www.sysopt.com/forum/frown.gif
mb: megabit
MB: megabyte
now i know

[DanU]

http://www.sysopt.com/forum/wink.gif Yah... I miss that distinction a lot too. I think in the future I'll type it out as Mbytes and Mbits so as not to cause confusion.

[SiteCharts.com]

Well actually Firewire is 480 Mbits/s => 60 MB/s!

[echo_pwd]

Is it?

[spidey_joe80@hotmail.com]

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGG!!!!
I will put an end to this. http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif
The following is what i read at sysopt.

Firewire that's twice as fast: IEEE 1394b
Posted by Scott Wainner @ 7:52 pm PST

The 1394 Trade Association announced that it had approved specifications for Firewire IEEE 1394b, which should achieve 800mbps compared to USB 2.0's 480mbs. USB 2.0 and 1394b will be competing head to head. According to News.com's article, Apple is the most likely candidate to be first to support 1394b, in Macs, as soon as late 2001 or early 2002.

1394b will double the speed of today's 1394 Firewire using the same copper wiring, but the 1394b standard is designed to allow speeds of 3.2Gbits/sec using plastic fiber optic, with a longer distance capability, in the future.

Sitcharts judging from what i read in the previous topic. I think that the 480 megabits/sec you were taliking about is usb 2.0 And since the next ieee will be 800 megabits it will transfer at 100 megabytes/sec twice as fast as the one we use today.

[SiteCharts.com]

I'm pretty sure I read it on another article about 1394b but maybe they or I mixed it up...

[alphageek]

All of the Firewire drives I've seen are IDE drives in a Firewire encloser. So, you don't gain any quality by going the IEE1394 route, but you do pay about $100 for the Firewire encloser.

[echo_pwd]

Thanks guys,

I just purchased E-IDE Yamaha 16/10/40 CRW2100EZ and tested it last night a little. It seems that I cannot burn CDs from my hard drive above 8x, which is weird. Is my comp too slow for this?

Pentium II 350MHz
256 MB PC100 RAM
Windows 2000 Pro

No other programs were running. The error I get is buffer underrun and Yamaha advertises this drive as burn proof. Both, hard drive and CD burner are connected to Promise Ultra ATA 66 PCI card.

Thanks

echo_pwd

[lazerbeam]

I have the same CD-RW that you have and no problemo (yet...). I know what a buffer overrun is,, data being stuffed into the cache/buffer faster than the CR-R/RW can pull it out and write to disk), so maybe under run is the opposite?? Although you didn't state so, I get the impression that you hard disk and the CD-RW are on the same controller and probabably in a master/slave configuration. This can cause timing problems (which is what I suspect a buffer under-run is). If you have another IDE controller put the CR-RW (or hard drive) on it. That way the 2 drives won't be sharing the same data/control lines and I bet it may clear up you problem. The problem you are having was noted years ago when CD-Rs were avail only as SCSI devices. This problem was very common when the source and destination (CD-R) were on the same controller. The only reliable solution was to use two separate SCSI controllers (not a cheap proposition back in those days)! The basic issue is still the same though, a high speed source (hard disk) and relatively slow (even at 16X) CD-R/RWs.. The buffer overun problem is "relatively" easily fixed with a large data buffer (2 MB in this case), but data that is arriving too slow is not so easly solved.

[lukangboy]

What type of CDRs do you have? If you have like 4x cdrs then you might get some problems trying to burn them too fast. Also if you get the generic brands you can get screw ups too