SATA in Firewire Caddy v IDE in F/W Caddy

[JazzyJ]

Hi,

can someone help me to understand something?

Will a SATA 7200rpm drive in a Firewire Enclosure have a faster data tranfer rate than an ATA 7200rpm drive in a Firewire Enclosure (both with the same Oxford chipset)?

I currently use a Oyen Digital 2.5' 80GB Firewire drive for audio, and it has a 7200 RPM Hitachi IDE ATA drive inside the caddy.

I want to get another Audio Drive that is larger and have seen that OWC sell Firewire Drives with SATA drives inside:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/on-the-go

They sell a 'FireWire 400 + USB 2.0 'Combo' 7200 rpm, 16MB Cache in 250GB, 320GB and 500GB sizes.

Can someone tell me whether it makes a difference to having a ATA or a SATA drive in a Firewire enclosure? Is it the Firewire interface that dictates the transfer speed alone -

or

Does the drive inside matter too?

So:

Will a SATA 7200rpm drive in a Firewire Enclosure have a faster data tranfer rate that a ATA 7200rpm drive in a Firewire Enclosure (both with the same Oxford chipset)?

[Craig F]

officially they should be the same do to the 400 Mb/s of the FireWire bus
now the SATA should do a better job of keeping the FireWire bus supplied with data
SATA drives should have better seek times over ATA drives
SATA drives have longer time between failure ratings that ATA (but I've had both fail)
personally I'd go SATA but, YMMV