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Test Drive: External Drive Connections, Part 2

Feb 25, 2008 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

           

This month’s segment is about external drives for DV and HDV editing. In the last segment, I identified the characteristics of the technologies you should be considering, and in this segment, I’ll discuss the results of my testing.

My tests revolved around the NewerTech miniStack v3 drive because it has connectors for USB 2.0, FireWire 400 and 800, and eSATA. Because the drive was obviously the same in these tests, it made it easy to test the performance of each connection type. Without further ado, let’s discuss the test results, starting with an Apple MacBook Pro powered by an Intel 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor. By way of background, the MacBook Pro comes with USB 2.0 and FireWire 400/800 connectors, and I added eSATA via an eSATA Express Card Adapter from Apiotek.

Figure 1. Test results with the NewerTech miniStack V3 drive using these connection types on a MacBook Pro.
Click here for a larger image

I used QuickBench from Intech Software to benchmark the drive. I ran the Extended test, which measured read/write performance with files up to 100MB in size. Figure 1 shows the first round of results with the read and write performance for the 100MB files.

Obviously, USB 2.0 is totally smoked by FireWire 800 and eSATA. If you’re using USB 2.0 for external editing, you’ll almost certainly see much more responsive editing with a faster connection. The question is, how much faster?

Figure 2. Test results from a variety of internal and external drives.
Click here for a larger image

To help put these numbers in perspective, I tested several other drives—including the internal drive of the MacBook Pro; SATA; and the internal and striped RAID drives of my Mac Pro, which is driven by two 3 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors. You can see the results in Figure 2.

As you can see, both the FireWire 800 and eSATA drives outperformed the MacBook Pro internal SATA drive. Both were also reasonably close to the Internal SATA from the Mac Pro, which means either external standard should deliver a similar editing experience to these internal drives. On the other hand, the Mac Pro striped RAID drive was nearly three and a half times faster than either external.

At least on the Mac, I was surprised that there was so little difference between eSATA and FireWire 800. I think buying a drive with eSATA is definitely the right decision because it’s an up-and-coming standard, and because it demands such an insignificant price premium, but if you already have a FireWire 800 connector, you should use that rather than spending the $50 or so for an Express Card, or $90 for a PCI card.

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