|
Also, besides the interconnect speed, you have to consider the drives.
Putting a drive that can not manage to “soak” a FW400 connection in an FW800 enclosure will not make it any faster. You would likely need at least a 7200 RPM (or even a 10000 RPM drive) to make the best possible use of the FW800 connection. Hopefully manufacturers would not sell FW800 enclosures with “poky” drives, but you never know.
Plus, when you are doing a copy operation (like using SuperDuper!) you must consider both the source and the destination drive (usually one is your internal disk). Since laptop drives are generally designed to save power they are often slower. When copying to/from an internal laptop HD from/to an external FW800 drive, the most likely bottleneck is your internal drive.
As a subjective test, you might try booting off of your FW800 drive. For a time I was running my iBook (originally with a 4200RPM internal, later with a 5400 RPM internal) off of an external FW400 7200RPM drive. The system was noticeably faster using the external, especially when the system started using virtual memory.
|