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Wrong!
Authored by: pasta on Apr 05, '04 02:31:32AM

You're a tool! ATA-100 and ATA-133 drives are capable of a maximum 100MB/s or 133MB/s. However, this is only achieved when utilizing the drive's cache, which is typically 2MB or, more recently, 8MB. After that, the SUSTAINED throughput drops off dramatically to the speed at which the information can be extracted or written to the actual platters. These sustained speeds vary among different manufacturers and different drives, but typically a 5400RPM drive is in the 15-16MB/s range and a 7200RPM drive is in the 22-23MB/s range. As a result, a Firewire drive can perform EXACTLY the same as an internal drive can EXCEPT for the initial 2MB or 8MB cache access. A Firewire bus is capable of 400Mb/s, which is 50MB/s. That's why when you create a Firewire striped RAID, you get almost double the transfer rates of a single drive. It's not exactly double because the Firewire bus reserves a portion of bandwidth for communications with devices, but it's damn near close.



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