fastest external drive connection - FW 800?

[banjo71]

I think internal SATA is the fastest record/playback audio storage. But if you have something external (I have a Glyph 1TB drive with USB 3.0, FW 800, or eSATA connectivity) is the FW 800 the fastest most reliable or is eSATA?

[JoelG]

From Wikipedia:

Aimed at the consumer market, eSATA enters an external storage market served also by the USB and FireWire interfaces. The SATA interface has certain advantages. Most external hard-disk-drive cases with FireWire or USB interfaces use either PATA or SATA drives and "bridges" to translate between the drives' interfaces and the enclosures' external ports; this bridging incurs some inefficiency. Some single disks can transfer 157 MB/s during real use, about four times the maximum transfer rate of USB 2.0 or FireWire 400 (IEEE 1394a) and almost twice as fast as the maximum transfer rate of FireWire 800. The S3200 FireWire 1394b spec reaches ~400 MB/s (3.2 Gbit/s), and USB 3.0 has a nominal speed of 5 Gbit/s. Some low-level drive features, such as S.M.A.R.T., may not operate through some USB or FireWire or USB+FireWire bridges; eSATA does not suffer from these issues provided that the controller manufacturer (and its drivers) presents eSATA drives as ATA devices, rather than as "SCSI" devices, as has been common with Silicon Image, JMicron, and NVIDIA nForce drivers for Windows Vista. In those cases SATA drives do not have low-level features accessible.

I don't think you'll have a problem with either, as far as speed goes.

Joel

[albee1952]

As I understand it, eSATA is exactly the same as internal SATA and would be the fastest of those options.