The AJA write test showed the FireWire 800 connection’s throughput at almost three times faster than the USB connected WD, with 58 percent faster read scores.
#Firewire 800 to usb 3.0 cable pro#
Using the same hard drive, but connected to our Mac Pro, we found the FireWire 400 connection to be 19 percent faster than the USB on the copy to the external drive, 21 percent faster on both the duplication test and the copy 5000 files test, and exactly the same in terms of performance difference on the AJA read and write tests as with the MacBook Pro.Ĭomparing the FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 results on the MacBook Pro with the My Book Studio showed the FireWire 800 connection to be 35 percent faster at copying the file to the external drive, 51 percent faster duplicating that file on the external drive, and 37 percent faster copying over the 5000 files and folders.
In the reading tests, however, the edge went to USB, which was nine percent faster than FireWire 400. Using AJA’s System Test application, we found the MacBook Pro’s FireWire 400 connection to be 46 percent faster than USB in the writing tests. In that test, we found the FireWire 400 transfer to be 26 percent faster than USB 2.0. To see how the different connections performed in more typical backup tasks, we copied over a 2.5GB folder containing 5000 individual files and folders. Duplicating that file using FireWire 400 on the WD drive took 10 percent less time than when run over USB 2.0. When we connected the MacBook Pro to a 2TB Western Digital My Book Studio drive and copied a 1GB file to it from the internal hard drive, we found that it took 23 percent less time over FireWire 400 than over USB 2.0.