Hands On: Relight my Firewire

PC vs Mac
We knew the UDMA card was quick, but how do the Mac results measure up against those from the PC tested last month?

Using the same 80x Lexar card, the 924MB read and write processes took 86 and 103 seconds, respectively, while the 300x UDMA card took 34 and 51 seconds for the read and write, respectively.

While the read times for the Lexar 80x card were roughly similar on both platforms, the PC strangely took longer to write the data back again.

The biggest difference in percentage terms, though, was using the 300x UDMA card, which transferred its data to the Mac more than 50 per cent quicker than it did to the PC. In terms of writing the data back to the card, the Mac was almost twice as fast. We can also reassure you that the PC’s internal disk performance was very good.

This is a great result for the Mac and proves that while the PC connection appeared to be working fine, there was room for improvement. We had our suspicions that all may not be well with Firewire 800 considering Microsoft’s required registry tweak under XP, and general unreliability with the interface under our Vista system.

While we wouldn’t expect anyone to switch to a Mac simply for superior Firewire 800 performance, it does show the value of comparing how the same technologies perform on different platforms. Until we tried the Mac, we assumed the limiting factor was the card speed and the UDMA CF standard, but these results raise questions over the implementation of Firewire 800 on our test systems - or perhaps under Windows in general.