DIT - Speed test results eSATA vs Firewire800 on Macbook pro

[Jonathan B.]

Just did a quick test of a raid to get benchmarks.

100MB/s Macbook Pro w/ Sonnet Tempo Sata
150MB/s Macbook Pro w/ Sonnet Tempo Sata Pro
250MB/s Mac Pro w/ Atto H380

Macbook Pros will transfer pretty fast with a good Expresscard Sata card. As you can see the Expresscard used has a pretty big speed difference and tower is needed to see the full potential of the drive. The Expresscard slot on a Macbook pro should be able to in theory push around 250MB/s.

Sorry for being offline for some month, somehow I didn't get notifications about this post, and lost track of it.

Thanks Dustin, this was a really interesting test. I had no clue that eSATA on a Macbook could be that much slower than on a Macpro while using the same drive. I would love to reach around 200 MB/s in my transfers with the Macbook pro. Of course it's tempting to go for a desktop computer when you see such a difference... but I love the portability of my rack. All I want from this system, is backup and preview of the footage, so to carry around a Mac pro for the sake of copying file seems a little overkill.

So if eSATA on laptop the bottle neck, then I guess Thunderbolt is the last alternative. The theoretical bit rates seems interesting, but how does that work on the field? Anyone using a laptop based solution with Thunderbolt, and reasonable RAIDs system, what do you reach?

An other thing is that MD5 requires some processing power, so that will be an other bottleneck with the laptop. Obviously we will to reach the performances of a desktop solution... But if I could double my transfer rate, I would then be comfortable with backing up 5K footage. Not always lagging behind.

[Melih Engin Eskier]

I'm as well new into DIT responsibility. We here at the office on our sets use eSATA as well. In favour of the speed you could talk for ages however when it comes to reliability, it is a little bit shaky. We've been experiencing exact copy problems. Do these problems rely on eSATA or the regular disk copy transfer? Have you experienced such problems on your setup?

[Melih Engin Eskier]

And we are using CalDigit eSATA express card which is almost the same price with Sonnet.

[Jonathan B.]

I'm as well new into DIT responsibility. We here at the office on our sets use eSATA as well. In favour of the speed you could talk for ages however when it comes to reliability, it is a little bit shaky. We've been experiencing exact copy problems. Do these problems rely on eSATA or the regular disk copy transfer? Have you experienced such problems on your setup?

Hi,

our copies have been very reliable. The whole setup with the card is a little fragile, so we boxed it properly in a rack so that there's no tension on the cable.

In your case, hard to tell what the issue is, but I would definitely try to replace eSATA card. The chances that a regular disk transfer fails are extremely small, if it happens repeatedly to you this means that there's something wrong in your setup.

[Melih Engin Eskier]

Hi,

our copies have been very reliable. The whole setup with the card is a little fragile, so we boxed it properly in a rack so that there's no tension on the cable.

In your case, hard to tell what the issue is, but I would definitely try to replace eSATA card. The chances that a regular disk transfer fails are extremely small, if it happens repeatedly to you this means that there's something wrong in your setup.

Thanks for your time Jonathan. I guess by boxing in a rack and taking the tension of the card cable you mean stabilizing the whole thing while transfer!

[Melih Engin Eskier]

Hi,

our copies have been very reliable. The whole setup with the card is a little fragile, so we boxed it properly in a rack so that there's no tension on the cable.

In your case, hard to tell what the issue is, but I would definitely try to replace eSATA card. The chances that a regular disk transfer fails are extremely small, if it happens repeatedly to you this means that there's something wrong in your setup.

Thanks for your time Jonathan. I guess by boxing in a rack and taking the tension of the card cable you mean stabilizing the whole thing while transfer!

[Jonathan B.]

That's right, I just have a thunderbolt cable going out of the box to the Mac (together with a power cable, and a firewire cable). Here's how it looks like (you see the sonnet on the left of the picture, a bit hidden in the back).



As for now, we still use Firewire with the Red mag since eSATA wasn't stable during mounting and unmounting with Mac OS X Lion. It was a driver issue with Sonnet's card. It might be fixed by now. Currently Firewire on the Red Mag is the bottle neck, I could try to use an eSATA multiplier to hook the three devices on it, or replace one of the drive by a Thunderbolt drive. That's the next move ;-)