Comparing MacBook Pro external drive performance
July 20, 2007
Yesterday I wrote about using SATA drives with a MacBook Pro. Is it worth the trouble going the external SATA route with a MacBook Pro for editing? It’s certainly valuable when doing media ingest in the field (e.g. P2) direct to a mirrored pair of disks. I like it simply because I need to move external SATA disks between the laptop and my desktop editing systems. But there’s also a performance advantage. But how much? I decided to run a little test comparing the performance of the following:
an external SATA, a LaCie d2 triple-interface FireWire drive, and the Mac Book Pro’s internal drive. While performance among various drives and interfaces is bound to vary, I think the test confirms that unless you’re using a RAID, the fastest single disk performance you’re going to see with a MacBook Pro is with an external SATA drive.
| MacBook Pro Disk Benchmark | ||||
| xBench Test | External SATA | LaCie d2 FW800 | LaCie d2 FW400 | Internal SATA |
|
|
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| Sequential Uncached | ||||
| Write [256K blocks] | 77.55 | 57.52 | 37.12 | 39.16 |
| Read [256K blocks] | 76.72 | 56.28 | 39.41 | 34.66 |
| Random Uncached | ||||
| Write [256K blocks] | 50.78 | 34.60 | 31.38 | 22.74 |
| Read [256K blocks] | 27.26 | 25.14 | 20.97 | 17.02 |
Notes: Xbench 1.3 used for tests, units in MB/sec; Hardware: MacBook Pro (Santa Rosa) w/ Fujitsu 5400 RPM SATA internal drive and SIIG eSATA II two-port EXpressCard/34 interface card; External SATA: Western Digital Caviar SE 2 SATA 7200 RPM drive w/ 16MB Cache in PowerSpec enclosure; External FireWire Drive: LaCie d2 Firewire Drive (internal: Western Digital IDE 7200 RPM drive w/ 8MB cache). All file systems HSF+/Journaled.
[…] while back I wrote about Using SATA drives with a MacBook Pro, and I also compared MacBook Pro external drive performance using SATA, FireWire 400, and FireWire 800. Today at the Boston Media Makers meeting I discussed my […]