Hands On: Relight my Firewire

Firewire has become a standard on most PC motherboards and is commonly used for connecting DV camcorders or external hard disks.

In our last Hands On Hardware, we examined the latest version of Firewire 800. In this month’s Performance, we’re following up with further analysis.

For full details on the interface and its history, check out January’s Hardware column, but briefly the original Firewire specification, technically described as IEEE-1394 (and also known as iLink), operated at a maximum speed of 400Mbits/sec.

In May 2001, the 1394 Trade Association announced its successor, 1394b, and renamed the original spec 1394a to differentiate them. 1394b doubles the bandwidth to 800Mbits/sec, with the potential for speeds up to 3.2Gbits/sec in the future, and also supports much longer cable lengths.

1394b, also known as Firewire 800, is backwards-compatible with the original standard, but employs a new nine-pin square plug. You can buy cables with the new nine-pin connector at one end and an older six-pin or four-pin plug on the other. But to enjoy the full 800Mbits/sec bandwidth, you’ll need a Firewire 800 controller with a nine-pin socket. For most of us, this means buying and fitting a new Firewire 800 card, from manufacturers such as Belkin for around £50.

Testing Firewire 800
Last month, we tested an ST Lab F-300 Firewire 800 PCI Express card with a Lexar Firewire 800 UDMA Compact Flash card reader, under both XP and Vista installations. Most Firewire 800 cards use the Texas Instruments OHCI driver that’s built into XP and Vista, but as discussed last month, we still had reliability issues with Vista. Owners of XP may also need to make the registry modification detailed in last month’s edition in order for the interface to operate at full speed.

At times like these, PC owners may glance enviously at the latest Macs, which feature Firewire 800 ports and operating system support as standard. But how well do they work in practice? We tested one of the latest iMacs, employing a 2GHz Core 2 Duo processor and running OS 10.4.10 (just previous to Leopard 10.5).

We connected the Lexar Firewire 800 card reader to the iMac using a nine-pin to nine-pin cable and performed the same tests as last month, timing how long it took to read and write a 924MB folder containing 168 digital camera Jpegs and Raw files to and from two different Compact Flash cards.

First up was an older Lexar 1GB card (rated at 80x), which took 82 seconds to read the data from the card and 90 seconds to write the data back onto it. The second card was one of Lexar’s top-of-the-range 4GB UDMA Compact Flash models (rated at 300x) which, while backwards-compatible with non-UDMA readers and peripherals, claims to deliver enhanced performance when used with UDMA-compliant devices.

Such devices include a handful of the latest Digital SLRs and Lexar’s Firewire 800 card reader. Once slotted in, the card performed impressively. The same 924MB worth of data took just 22.6 seconds to read and 27.9 seconds to write back onto a formatted card - both over three times quicker.