Once and for all, proof that Macs are cheaper than PCs

Machinist.Salon ^ | By Farhad Manjoo

[Blue Highway]

I meant to say the eSATA for PC’s were slightly less than that for Apples. Have a nice day.

[antiRepublicrat]

Hey how about specifics in that test where eSATA was only 20% faster than Firewire 400? This sounds like something you can't back up, and there might be some insignificant stat where it might only be 20% faster.

Some review a while back, can't remember. Making me search, huh? ... Here. Read the times, calculate. My memory said about 20%, but it turns out 22% faster than Firewire *400*, and remember I'm talking about Firewire 800.

Read the lists atTom's Hardware. You'll notice that a single eSATA drive generally loses to a Firewire 800 2-drive RAID enclosure despite being over three times as fast on paper, thus confirming my statement that one drive can't fully feed either eSATA or Firewire 800. eSATA has no real advantage when hooked to one drive, and some disadvantages.

Heck I read a review from a Mac site that confirmed eSATA trumped Firewire 800 handily, but the idiot used different drives on all 4 different interfaces, which doesn't make for a valid comparison.

The review above used Seagate's USB/Firewire (400) drive and Seagate's eSATA drive for the comparison. That does expose a problem with eSATA, in that not all controllers are created equal -- caveat emptor. You know what you're getting when you buy Firewire.

I read a few users comments and most seem to sheepishly acknowledge but they all seem like yourself in that they don't want to admit there is something superior to Firewire.

As with all things, it depends on your use. It's useless to claim one thing's better because of one attribute (speed, in your case). You have to go by the specific needs. I clearly stated Firewire is better for me for reasons in addition to speed. Now if I wanted a relatively cheap, high-bandwidth RAID box, eSATA might be a good idea if I had eSATA on my system (Mac or PC -- my PC does have it, but I'm afraid it's one of the many broken implementations).

The paradoxical thing is Mac users don't have a problem getting ripped off paying more for most every other piece of software/peripheral over a PC counterpart

Funny, all my peripherals work on both Mac and PC, so how do you explain Mac peripherals being more expensive when they're the same? Even funnier, some of my peripherals mainly marketed towards PCs work better on my Mac. For example, I moved an UPS from my PC to my Mac, and I didn't have to install the crappy UPS software on the Mac to get full functionality out of it.

BTW I know the eSATA controller cards cost slightly less than that. How does $50 strike you?

So I can buy a 500 GB drive with all three connectors on it and use it straight with my Firewire 800 port. Or I could spend an extra $50 just so I can use the eSATA port instead with no real performance benefits?

BTW, eSATA's raw bandwidth is 3 Gb/s, but it's actual data rate is only 300 MB/s. A straight divide by 8 doesn't work. It does for Firewire 800 though.