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New
EZQuest
Cobra FireWire Drive Has Speed To Burn Even Without
The Oxford 911 Chip Set. May
18th, 2001 The
EZQuest Cobra was every bit the equal of the
other fast FireWire drives, even though it uses
a chip set other than the now famous Oxford 911.
As
many of you know by now, there's no such thing
as a "native" FireWire drive. All FireWire
drives currently being sold are Ultra ATA drives
with an ATA to FireWire bridge board. My tests
show that, in the real world, the newest,
fastest FireWire bridge boards are still a step
or two slower than a direct Ultra ATA/66
interface. Be
aware that the performance of the FireWire drive
enclosures will vary, depending on what model of
Power Mac you have. Different system bus speeds
and different FireWire controller chips produce
different
results as you can see in a recent
test. Also,
the performance can vary depending on what
FireWire drivers you use. For example, in recent
testing, drives formatted and mounted with FWB's
HD Toolkit 4.5.1 ran much faster than when
mounted with Apple's generic FireWire
enablers. On
a non-performance note, I was very impressed
with the quality of plastics used on the
EZQuest
case. Its "clear over silver" plastics match the
newest Power Macs and Power Cube more closely
than any other third party peripheral I've used.
However, the case is only available WITH a
drive. (NOTE: since this test, both
FWDepot.com
and OWC
have come out with better looking "Oxford 911"
enclosures which are available with or without a
drive.) TEST
NOTES FIREWIRE
DRIVE ENCLOSURES TESTED TEST
SYSTEM REAL
WORLD TESTS RELATED
TESTS The
same FireWire drive on various models of Power
Mac. WHERE
TO BUY The
EZQuest Cobra FireWire case always comes with a drive installed. It is available from Small Dog Electronics. (It ships with Intech's HD Speed Tools software.) Other
World Computing
sells Elite "Oxford 911" version of their
Mercury FireWire enclosure without a drive for
$139. It includes El Gato's Disk Control
software. You can also buy it with the fast
40G
IBM 60GXP
for $310. FWDepot
sells essentially the same enclosure as OWC for
$138 (or $1 less). Granite
Digital
sells their "Oxford 911" enclosures
for $159. (It comes with Charismac Anubis
Utility software.) They also have drives and
PCI
controllers.
In fact, if you build your own FireWire
enclosures, they will sell you the bare
FireWire/IDE
bridge board.
Don't
have FireWire in your G3 PowerBook?
FWDepot
has a good CardBus card with two ports for $86.
Don't
have FireWire on your Desktop? Get a PCI
controller. The fastest PCI FireWire/USB combo
card I've tested was the USB/FireWire PCI card
from FWDepot.
If you don't need USB and just want to add more
FireWire channels, then you might hold out for
the soon to be released Granite
Digital 3 Channel PCI
controller.
See
the STORAGE section of my HOT
DEALS
page for other sources for these
products. BARE FEATS HOME SPEED
TEST RESULTS
from Bare Feats (by CATEGORY) LINKS
to SPEED tests on other web sites HOT
SPEED DEALS DOWNLOADS
that add more SPEED SPEED
UPGRADE
guide © 2001 Rob Art Morgan
by rob
ART morgan,
Bare Feats Mad ScientistThe
folks at EZQuest
are claiming speed to match the Granite Digital
and OWC Mercury Elite FireWire drive enclosures
without using the Oxford 911 chip set. Is it
hype or reality? I decided to see for myself
using some new "real world" drive speed tests. I
compared the three models of FireWire drive
enclosures using the IBM 75GXP series drive. For
added perspective, I threw in test results with
the same drive connected to Ultra ATA ports.
Finally, I included the VST Full Height drive
(75gxp) to show the performance gains over "last
year's" FireWire drive enclosure
technology.
PERFORMANCE
ANALYSIS
EZQuest
Cobra model tested came with an IBM 75GXP 75GB
ATA/100 7200rpm drive.
Other
World Computing
Elite "Oxford 911" version of their Mercury
FireWire enclosure with an IBM 75GXP 30G ATA/100
7200rpm drive courtesy of TransIntl.
Granite
Digital
with an IBM 75GXP 46GB ATA/100 7200rpm
drive.
VST's
Full Height
FireWire drive with an IBM 75GXP 46GB ATA/100
7200rpm drive.
Dual G4/533 running Mac OS 9.1 and FireWire
2.8.1.
1. Duplicate in Finder one 177MB document.
Compute megabytes per second with the formula
size*2/time.
2. Duplicate a folder with 1693 documents (164MB
total). Compute megabytes per second with the
formula size*2/time.
3. Using QuickTime Player 5.01 and a stopwatch,
time how long it takes to play a 154 frame
720x576 uncompressed QuickTime movie (play all
frames). Calculate frames per second.
"BARE facts on Macintosh speed FEATS"
Feel free to email
, the webmaster and chief mad scientist