USB 3 seems to do the job.Ī very interesting test would be esata over thunderbolt. – one thunderbolt drive for projects I am currently working on My new favorite storage strategy is rather simple: The question is, not even whether USB 3 outperforms Firewire in every respect, but whether it is a usable alternative. The circle is bigger, the path is longer, so you can put more data on it.įirewire is a dying technology, there is no development, ports are vanishing and the price is not competitive. On the outside of the platters the disk reaches a higher transfer speed. Different partitions on a disk might result in different speeds, because the transfer rate the hard disk is able to reach depends also from the physical position of the heads on the platters. I see one remaining issue in the method you used however. It is interesting to see real world figures instead of just ‘800 mb/s’, ‘5 gb/s’ etc. Overall you did a good job testing the transfer this way. Since I was looking to have a smaller enclosure, I decided to give the Oyen Digital a shot. I found two: LaCie’s Rugged 1TB (which I’ve used in the past with no issues) and the Oyen Digital Mini Pro. That configuration isn’t as easy to find as you would think on a portable drive. Ideally I would want to test the same drive that has both Firewire 800 and USB 3 built-in. That meant that I didn’t want to use two different drives. Since I couldn’t find the data I wanted, I decided to do my own tests. Most of what I found was comparisons to USB 2 or tests done before Macs had USB 3 built-in. I did searches online and really didn’t come up with much in the way of current data or test. Now that both the MacBook Pro Retina Display and MacBook Air ship with USB 3 I was curious to find out which was actually faster? Going with my existing Firewire 800 drives and the Thunderbolt to Firewire adapter or USB 3 drives.

Easiest connection firewire 800 to usb