JUNE 23--A new set of comprehensive performance tests conducted by Bare Feats (www.barefeats.com), a private hardware analytical organization, shows FireWire 800 matching ATA-133 performance in basic read and write functions and far exceeding the performance of USB 2.0 in all comparisons. Barefeats conducted five complete performance tests comparing six different standards--FireWire 800 built-in; FireWire 800; PCI; FireWire 400; ATA-133; Ultra320 SCSI; and USB 2.0. The tests were performed using an FW Depot IceCube 800 drive, and included 100 MB block sustained READ and 100 MB block sustained WRITE; 128K-1024K Random READ and Random WRITE; and 457 MB Finder Duplicate.
In all of the tests, Ultra320 SCSI far outpaced ATA-133 and all FireWire implementations by 50% to 60%, while USB 2.0 ran well behind the other standards and lagged FireWire 800 by between 50% and 70% in all tests.
"There is very positive news for the 1394 standard throughout all of these test results," said James Snider, executive director of the 1394 Trade Association (Grapevine, TX; www.1394ta.org). "For example, FireWire 400 operated much more efficiently than USB 2.0 and consistently yielded much better throughput. FireWire 800 kept pace with ATA-133. Both are much more cost-efficient than UltraSCSI."
The first computers and disk drives incorporating FireWire 800, which is based on the IEEE 1394b version of the standard, were introduced in January of this year. More computer and consumer electronics products incorporating it are in development now.
Bare Feats concluded that the FireWire 800 interface runs significantly faster than the older FireWire 400 version, as expected. While write speed for FireWire products was slightly better with built in rather than PCI ports, read speed measured identically in read and write mode. The FireWire 800 speed "is now very close to that of ATA-133, and in one sense, FireWire 800 could be called external ATA-6," according to the report.
