Transfer rates to External HDD

Scott Murray

Senior Member
Ok I have been doing some testing and it seems that I can transfer to my lacie 1TB hdd around 8gb in 3mins. Is this acceptable? This is via firewire 800 not USB 3.0 as my mac doesn't have it.
 
Last edited:

Scott Murray

Senior Member
Just bought a thunderbolt 1TB HDD aswell hopefully it will arrive here before I leave.

Screen Shot 2013-02-26 at 11.35.06 AM.png
 

capitaltpt

Senior Member
Thunderbolt on external HDD's is nothing but a marketing scheme. Most mechanical HDD's don't even saturate SATA I speeds (1.5Gbps). In fact, my WD Caviar Black drive (which is typically faster than what is used in most external hard drives) gives me sequential read/writes at just under 100 MBps. That is 800Mbps (please note the difference between bits and Bytes), which is the top speed of Firewire. Thunderbolt has a top speed of 10Gbps (that's 1.25 GB's per second). You honestly will probably not see a bit of difference between your Firewire drive and your thunderbolt drive.
 

Patrick M

Senior Member
Can't you you a "regular" LAN cable? They are typically 100/1000gps which ought to be significantly faster than FireWire.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD
 

Scott Murray

Senior Member
Can't you you a "regular" LAN cable? They are typically 100/1000gps which ought to be significantly faster than FireWire.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD
Am preparing for 2 months in Africa, have a thunderbolt built HDD coming which should triple my transfer rate as the last test was at firewire 800 and not USB 3.0. Most Macs dont use this unless newer models "2013". but they have thunderbolt which is fractionally quicker.
 

WhiteLight

Senior Member
Yep that's pretty good actually.. Fire wire and usb3 are the fastest you can get on the move.. FireWire being a little faster.
However i don't think you'll need all that speed actually if you plan things well. You can carry 2 16gb cards with each camera and every night religiously import then into your laptop or external... that makes things easy when on long trips

Sent from my Incredible S using Tapatalk 2
 
Top