Has anyone tried the SmartDisk Firewire drives on .mac?

brianleahy

brianleahy

Colonel Panic
Does anyone have any experience with these? Any opinion on whether they're worth the $$?

I'm talking about the SmartDisk Firewire drives that .mac members can get a $30 rebate on...
 
I am using the compact flash firewire reader on titanium os x and it works great!. Much faster than using my coolpix usb link.
 
Was asking myself the same thing. Very tempting, huh? Btw, they just work with the firewire-plug or any other electricity plug needed as well if not even battery!?
 
Well I caved and ordered the 120gb drive last week. When I get it later this week, I'll post my review. ;)
 
My Smartdisk 120GB firewire drive came today.

Setup could hardly be easier (though it does have it's own power supply. I wonder why there are so few bus-powered firewire peripherals...) Connect the power pack & firewire cable and you're off and running.

It's VERY quiet and fairly stylish.

Xbench returned these stats for the drive:

Disk Test 60.17
Sequential 48.57
Uncached Write 59.91 26.14 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 62.25 25.33 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 41.11 6.47 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 39.57 17.07 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 79.04
Uncached Write 73.56 1.11 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 99.57 22.84 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 90.65 0.59 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 62.73 12.30 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Quite respectable. In fact, it writes faster than my internal 60GB drive, though it reads more slowly.

Here are the stats for my (apple-original) internal 60gb drive:

Disk Test 67.56
Sequential 64.22
Uncached Write 55.85 24.37 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 57.34 23.33 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 128.29 20.21 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 52.22 22.53 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 71.27
Uncached Write 56.54 0.85 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 66.90 15.35 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 95.45 0.62 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 76.86 15.06 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Two thumbs up! :cool:
 
Wow! You should consider to run your macosx on the new drive! ;)
How fast is the average access time?
 
At the moment, I don't have a good utility that can calculate the average access time. Can anyone recommend one?
 
I purchased an 80 gig model, and am very happy with it ... plan to use it for video work and PLANNED to use it for backups with Retrospect, but it seems Dantz does not support SmartDisk, which seems strange. Any input.

ALSO, if this is the case, does anyone have any guidance for me about backing up? I guess I could backup to a DVD ...
 
At this point, I will add that the stated specs on the Smartdrive's box are:

Latency: 4ms
Seek Time: 9ms
Transfer Rate: 40 MB/sec Peak
32 MB/sec Avg

Apple's Backup 2 Beta works pretty well for backing up to a drive. Alas, it will only back up to CDs and DVDs on drives that can be 'burned to' in Finder.

I bodged together an Applescript app for doing backups in Toast. I create a folder full of aliases to files & folders I want backed up, and the app dices them into DVD-sized Toast-files, which can then be burned to any Toast-supported drive. It's far from perfect, but works fairly well. Pretty hands-on, though.
 
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