Re: single drive esata vs. firewire 800

[Michael Sacci] "I get roughly 5 GB/s vs. FW800 at 2 GB/s"

Michael, you might want to restate those numbers. There is no way you're getting 5 gigabytes per second off of one drive.

Jay, eSATA is faster, but not as easy to use for Mac people because eSATA requires an adaptor on the macbook pro. eSATA can go as fast as around 300MB/sec, but if you only use it in a one drive configuration, it will only go as fast as that drive will go, which is generally between 100-120MB/sec.

Firewire 800 is much more convenient and in my opinion more reliable too because it doesn't require an extra adaptor that can sometimes be a little finicky. Fastest I've seen a FW800 drive go is around 80MB/sec.

If you're just dealing with DV, AVCHD, DVCPRO, HDV stuff, then I don't think you'll notice a huge difference. If you want a drive with eSATA on it, I'd suggest getting it with FW800 too, that way, you have a backup.

If you want to capture directly to the drive, I've probably suggest eSATA so that it doesn't effect the bandwidth of the firewire bus that you're trying to capture off of.

-Russ

Russell Lasson
Colorist/Digital Cinema Specialist
Color Mill
Salt Lake City, UT
www.colormill.net