garageCube

I've read that external Harddisks make a better performance, right???

I use a MacBook Pro with 2,16 GHz and 3 GB of RAM with a 320 GB HD with 7200 rpm.

Is there a better performance in Modul8 if I use an external Disk for my footage? And when, what connection is the best USB 2.0 FireWire 800 or eSATA???

And be 5400 rpm enough???

I would like to follow-up and ask another question that relates to this. Hope I am not hijacking the thread however.

If I have a 10,000rpm firewire 400 drive and I put the operating system on it, and boot from this drive...how fast is using this external drive as my main drive compared to using the internal drive.

I love having a clean drive strictly for VJ'ing but I am really afraid of performance issues.

vjjustinallen wrote:I would like to follow-up and ask another question that relates to this. Hope I am not hijacking the thread however.

If I have a 10,000rpm firewire 400 drive and I put the operating system on it, and boot from this drive...how fast is using this external drive as my main drive compared to using the internal drive.

I love having a clean drive strictly for VJ'ing but I am really afraid of performance issues.

I used to boot from external drive to do my production - running After Effects and so on. This way I have my main drive just for performance.
In general I do not see any difference using M8 on these drives. But I have not tested running show from external boot though.

Word is that the SSD drives deliver on performance.

Personally, I think you're probably not getting the most out of your drive if you're running FW 400 as the interface. Will you get lower seek times with a 10,000 RPM drive? Probably. Is that same drive capable of saturating a FW400 interface? Almost certainly. And, with your current MBP, you're probably actually getting less transfer over FW 400 than over the internal SATA connection. FW800 would *Probably* be better, but it depends on the drives.

Personally, I've found that a 7200 internal drive on my MPB is quite fast. However, the only real way to know is to test with your particular system.

I only use external hard drives for any show FW 800 with a raid 0 configuration at 7200 rpm.It works like a charm ...I never had any problems with it...I am planning to use the same case http://www.galaxymetalgear.com/products/3500_mgbr.html for a 10.000 rpm raptor hard drives ,much more responsive... As is , it is very fast ,but you know how it is ...I want more and more speed.

Bucharest wrote:I only use external hard drives for any show FW 800 with a raid 0 configuration at 7200 rpm.It works like a charm ...I never had any problems with it...I am planning to use the same case http://www.galaxymetalgear.com/products/3500_mgbr.html for a 10.000 rpm raptor hard drives ,much more responsive... As is , it is very fast ,but you know how it is ...I want more and more speed.

Yeah, something like this would be an improvement over pretty much any stock laptop hard drive...

I am also thinking about getting a new drive. I've been using a Lacie Rugged 7200 RPM with FW800 and it has performed well. It's small and ugly and rugged. I just spotted that Lacie has released an eSata drive in the Rugged series. My dilemma: The drive only has eSata + USB 2.0. I can get a PCI card for my MBP and run the drive with eSata but if I ever upgrade to a Unibody, I'll have to toss that drive, since the 15" unibody doesn't have a card slot and there is no way I'm running it on USB 2.0. Or maybe get the 17" Unibody but I don't want to lug around on a 17"...

Are there any other rugged eSata drives out there that has FW400 and/or FW800 as well?

I don't want to rain on anyone's parade here, but it seems to me that some people (I'm not referring to anyone in particular here) go with an external drive just because they assume that it will be faster. While it was definitely true that laptop hard drives were once far slower than their desktop brethren, that's not so much the case any more. Here's an example from my setup:

I have a 15" MBP (2.53 GHz / 4 Gig RAM). It has a 320 Gig Seagate Momentus® 7200.3 hard drive and the following represents the numbers that the drive produces under XBench 1.3:

Disk Test 56.83
Sequential 106.93
Uncached Write 124.52 76.45 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 123.33 69.78 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 69.27 20.27 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 146.34 73.55 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 38.70
Uncached Write 12.84 1.36 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 157.31 50.36 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 83.86 0.59 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 139.43 25.87 MB/sec [256K blocks]

As you can see, it's no slouch. The FireWire 800 interface MAXES out at 98 Megs/second (or 786 MegaBITS/second) so while there is SOME room for improvement, it's not a lot. Remember, we're not stuck in the days of the 4200 RPM laptop drive anymore.

I realize that there are many very valid reasons to use an external drive for Modul8, but I do feel like some people assume that any external drive is going to blow away an internal drive. I think it's clear that this isn't necessarily the case. Personally, I can run 2048*768 Full-Quality Photo JPEG clips off of my internal drive and I've been very happy with the performance. Of course, YMMV...

Hear hear! The Lacie Rugged XL claims to have up to 80 MB/s at it's best. So it's not that far at all from your specs.

Another thing I was thinking about was changing the internal HD to a 7200rpm drive. I have a 5400rpm 150GB drive which is nada. Just need to find a nice one that fits. Macworld had a manual that covered how to swap the drive yourself.

The Momentus that I have is a 7200 RPM drive. While there are some fast 5400 RPM drives out there, I think that generally speaking, 7200 RPM drives are much more performance oriented. Of course, you should always look at what you're buying, but I think pretty much any current 7200 should be pretty adequate unless you're running some super high resolution clips in which case you're probably going to need more video performance than a laptop can offer anyways...

Fry_up.... man I just get a Lacie Rugged and it doesnt work on my FW800 port.... it turns off after few minutes... It only runs on the FW400 format. In the Lacie support forum they say it is a problen with Rugged design and his ability to get power from the FW800 bus.

Plz tell me, How you make it work in FW800 on a MBP? You use the adittional USB power supply cable?

Sonicocr wrote:Fry_up.... man I just get a Lacie Rugged and it doesnt work on my FW800 port.... it turns off after few minutes... It only runs on the FW400 format. In the Lacie support forum they say it is a problen with Rugged design and his ability to get power from the FW800 bus.

Plz tell me, How you make it work in FW800 on a MBP? You use the adittional USB power supply cable?

Oh? I don't have that problem with the FW800 on my MBP 2.33 GHz. I have however had problems with the power on the USB ports. Therefore I did get the power supply for the rugged just in case and usually I plug it in during shows just in case but I never had a problem on those occation when I didn't plug it in. I solved the USB problem by using a usb hub with a power supply.

The extra power does not come from an additional USB cable, it's a power supply that you plug in to the power outlet. Even if you theoretically could get power from the USB ports it's a bad idea to plug in two cables to the same drive. I don't even know which one has precedence. If it even works the computer might just use the USB and you're stuck with lousy transfer rates. I did this by misstake once with another tripple interface drive and pulled out the cable which was active without unmounting the drive first. Bad idea, don't go there - just plug in one cable to the drive and one power supply (not a USB cable).

gmint wrote:I don't want to rain on anyone's parade here, but it seems to me that some people (I'm not referring to anyone in particular here) go with an external drive just because they assume that it will be faster.

. i've been of the mindset that it's better to keep the data off the same drive as the system HD, especially when running a lot of video/audio files at the same time.

. though, i agree that for many applications running on the internal HD is probably enough

anomad wrote:

gmint wrote:I don't want to rain on anyone's parade here, but it seems to me that some people (I'm not referring to anyone in particular here) go with an external drive just because they assume that it will be faster.

. i've been of the mindset that it's better to keep the data off the same drive as the system HD, especially when running a lot of video/audio files at the same time.

. though, i agree that for many applications running on the internal HD is probably enough

I agree that keeping the system is probably a valid aim. However, the thing is that most of the stuff that the system uses is probably loaded into RAM anyways. Unless you're launching a whole bunch of apps while you're VJing, the system is basically staying in a pretty static state. I don't think you're doing any harm, but I think it's disputable as to whether or not you're getting a whole lot of extra performance...