Firewire Hard disk

[Tenson]

I got myself a G3 Apple laptop and a Firewire soundcard. However the internal hard dish is really slow, like 4mb/sec!!

Now I have an external drive which is USB 2 but the laptop only has USB 1 which is too slow as well so I was wondering.. if I got a Firewire disk enclosure would the one Firewire port on the laptop be fast enough to keep up with all this? I would have a 10in/10out soundcard and a full speed hard disk on one Firewire port. I think that splits the data rate at like 15mb/sec for each device.

Basically does one Firewire port have enough bandwidth to handle both the hard disk and soundcard at the same time?

 

[lAmBoY]

i doubt it would split so accurately - more like allow the drive the lions share of the bandwidth when needed.

but - are you going to run the OS from the external drive?

I dont understand why the internal drive is so slow in the first place?

 

[Tenson]

OS and programs running on the internal drive and audio being stored on the external. I knew laptop drives were slow, but I am shocked its this slow! Maybe DMA isn''t enabled on it, how do you enable it in OSX? I tried hdpalm but it doesn't seem to have it.

 

[nsherin]

It "should' work, but don't count on it. I used to use an external FireWire hard drive and CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drive a few years ago with my laptop, as USB 1.1 wouldn't have been fast enough for either. From memory, I could burn files from the FireWire hard drive onto a CD-R/RW without any problems - i.e. buffer-underuns.

The FireWire port wasn't native either - it was a PCMCIA/PC Card. Dunno if your G3 notebook has one of those slots, but if so, for around £30, you can add another couple of FireWire (or USB 2.0) ports to it.

Oh, on a side note, it's only been over the last couple of years or so that notebook drives have hit 7200RPM spin speeds. Even a 5400RPM notebook drive seems considerably faster than a 4200RPM drive (likely what your internal drive is). You could also look at upgrading the drive - notebook drives have just hit 100GB and forgoing the FireWire hard drive idea.