While swapping out disk drives (first to upgrade the internal drive in my MacBook Pro and later to give Time Machine more room), I took some quick performance snapshots with xbench and showed that, depending on I/O type, FireWire can be almost twice as fast as USB, but neither really holds a candle to SATA.

I also took the opportunity to compare the highly-integrated USB 2.0 controller in my Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini with the much more complicated FireWire/USB combo found in the Verbatim SmartDisk, as well as the performance of three popular notebook hard disk models.

This post is part of my series focused on PC/Mac Integration.

• Vista, OS X Boot Time Compared
• Quick and Easy Bluetooth Sharing Between PC and Mac
• Yes, FireWire is Faster Than USB
• How to Keep an IOGear KVM from Dimming Your Mac's Screen
• Command and Control: The Clash of Keyboards

Test Setup

I’ll be the first to admit that this wasn’t the most scientific test ever.  I just happened to have three hard drives, two external drive chassis, and one notebook computer, and whipped off a quick xbench test with each of the (many) permutations of these I happened upon.

First, the drives:

1. My MacBook Pro (late 2007) came with a 120 GB Fujitsu MH2120BH drive built in.  This MHY2 series drive is from Fujitsu’s previous generation and was their first with perpendicular recording.
2. I replaced this with a 320 GB Western Digital WD3200BEVT drive sourced from a Verbatim SmartDisk FireWire/USB portable enclosure.  This is the latest Scorpio Blue model from Western Digital and incorporates all their bells and whistles, including native command queueing (NCQ), though it’s not the fastest portable disk they make.
3. After running out of space for Time Machine, I swapped the Fujitsu out for a 160 GB Seagate ST9160821AS drive sourced from a Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini USB enclosure.  This is also a previous-generation (5400.3) drive and lacks NCQ.

Now, the enclosures:

1. In this corner, we have Verbatim’s SmartDisk portable FireWire/USB enclosure, which originally housed the impressive WD drive.  It’s powered by a mighty collection of electronics, including an Oxford Semiconductor OXUF934SSA controller and some impressive capacitors.
2. In the other corner, we have Maxtor’s OneTouch 4 Mini USB enclosure, which has the most compact integrated interface I’ve ever seen – a single Initio INIC-1605L.

As you can see, the test was seriously flawed.  The drives aren’t comparable, and neither are the controllers. I only ran the test once, I changed the content of the drives between tests, and I didn’t even try every possible combination.  Will this stop me from reporting the results?  No!

USB vs. FireWire

First up, let’s compare the performance of USB 2.0 and FireWire S400.  Rated at 480 megabits per second, USB is supposed to win, but experts agree that it won’t. For example, in Tom’s Hardware tests, every FireWire drive outperforms every USB drive, and that’s a fact.  Despite the limitations of my test, my results bear this out.

Let’s set the stage by comparing the performance of the two interfaces on the Verbatim enclosure to the internal SATA connection in the MacBook Pro.  We’ll use sequential performance numbers only, since random I/O is limited by the seek time of the disk drives.

As we can see, FireWire outperformed USB in every test, and was able to match SATA when it came to sequential reads of 4K.  FireWire S400 was anywhere from 8% to 45% faster than USB 2.0 in my tests, and a difference of this magnitude should be somewhat noticeable to the user.  Note that Apple’s (or Oxford’s) implementation of the USB and FireWire hardware might account for some of this difference.

USB vs. USB

Let’s turn now to a comparison of the USB 2.0 performance of the Verbatim/Oxford enclosure and the Maxtor/Initio alternative. I’ve always suspected that some chipsets were better than others, and I was right! Maxtor is 3% to 8% slower than Verbatim using the same drives.  This should only magnify the differences between FireWire and USB illustrated above!

Drive Against Drive

Finally, let’s see how the disk drives themselves perform.  There are two core considerations: Maximum throughput and seek time.  Larger drives tend to excel at throughput, but seek time (the core component of I/O latency) is more of a black art, with both spindle speed and disk density playing a part.

To compare seek time, we use the random I/O performance of the three drives.  We will normalize against the maximum result in each test to magnify the differences and hide the fact that random 4K I/O is really really slow compared to 256K or sequential access.

We can see here that the drives are fairly well-matched at random reads, meaning that their head movement and tracking performance is about equal, as is their rated spindle speed.  But writes show more pronounced differences, with the Seagate unit quite a bit slower than the others.

One item really stands out:  The WD’s ace performance with tiny random writes.  I’d suggest this is due to the benefits of native command queueing (NCQ), which is present in this drive and not in the others.  It looks like NCQ really does provide noticeable benefits in random I/O!

Finally, let’s think in absolute terms – just how fast are these drives? I only tested the Fujitsu and Western Digital with a SATA connection, but these drives peaked at just under 50 megabytes per second and nearly 57 megabytes per second, respectively.  This performance was maintained on large sequential accesses for both read and write operations.  These are respectable numbers, to say the least:  Half-duplex FireWire S400 should top out at 49 MB/s!  So this chipset and controller must implement the asynchronous streaming feature of 1394a to bump up performance to near-SATA levels.  Awesome!

Although I did not test the Seagate over SATA, all three drives turned in similar large sequential I/O scores on the FireWire interface, which suggests that it would be right up there in streaming performance, at least the equal of the Fujitsu.

In Conclusion

Let me sum up my findings:

• FireWire S400 is faster than USB 2.0 in nearly every respect, and sometimes much faster
• FireWire S400 can even approach SATA when streaming data, but the latter is much faster when it comes to lots of I/O requests
• Different USB controllers can affect all areas of performance
• Native command queueing (NCQ) seems to speed up small random writes by a respectable 2x at least
• Modern-ish notebook drives are wicked fast – every test beats anything I ever saw on my old desktops and laptops

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Yes, FireWire is Faster Than USB
This post was categorized as Apple, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Uh oh, after this backup I'll only have a few GB left on my Time Machine backup drive!

Well, that happened pretty quickly!  After upgrading the internal hard drive on my MacBook Pro to 320 GB, I moved the 120 GB disk Apple shipped with the machine to my Verbatim SmartDisk FireWire+USB enclosure to use as a Time Machine backup target.  Despite applying some tricks to reduce the amount of data backed up by Time Machine, I filled up the 120 GB drive pretty quickly indeed!  So I decided to swap the 160 GB drive from my Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini USB drive into the (faster) Verbatim FireWire enclosure to give Time Machine some (temporary) breathing room.

It turns out that you can move Time Machine backups easily, with included OS X tools, and without breaking anything.  My old backups are still visible, and I have another 40 GB to work with.  Read on for the details!

This post is part of my series focused on Apple OS X tips and tricks.

• Access NTFS Volumes On Your Mac
• Clean Up Your Mac! Essential OS X Tidiness Tools and Techniques
• How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk
• Hallelujah! OS X Can Reduce PDF File Size!
• Custom Drive Icons in Mac OS X
• OS X Custom Drive Icons 2: Boot Camp and NTFS

The Windup

In order to effectively use Time Machine, you really need a backup target disk larger than the one you’re backing up.  But I didn’t have that.  I was able to prune out 28 GB of data in my home directory that didn’t need to be backed up, along with 22 GB of operating system data, by tuning Time Machine.  Although my lappie has over 300 GB of storage space, Time Machine only has to back up 66 GB of it – Windows Vista has 55 GB, 50 GB doesn’t need to be backed up, and the rest is empty.

The little 111 GB (usable) backup drive that I created when I stuffed the Fujitsu MH2120BH disk that came with my MacBook Pro into the vacated Verbatim enclosure that donated its Western Digital WD3200BEVT to my laptop was enough for a while.  But this wouldn’t be enough for long:  Time Machine currently takes up 103 GB to store a month and a half worth of my system backups.

Since I already had a 160 GB Maxtor OneTouch Mini 4 USB drive sitting around half full for Windows backups, I decided to swap the disk drive units between enclosures to get an extra 40 GB for Time Machine.  It turns out the Maxtor used a Seagate ST9160821AS drive, by the way.

Why not leave the drives in place and just use the Maxtor for Time Machine?  Three reasons:

1. FireWire is substantially faster than USB 2.0 (as I’ll show in a future post)
2. My MacBook has just one USB port that would work with the Maxtor, and I like to leave the Time Machine drive plugged in when I’m home, which would leave me with a hub (which I don’t have) or only a single USB port for everything else
3. I’m a nut and love to rip things apart and tinker with them

Most people will probably want to just go out and buy a bigger disk.

Moving Your Time Machine Data

Let’s say you have an old (full) Time Machine disk and a new (empty) one and you’d like to preserve your old backups.  Here’s how to move the Time Machine data without losing anything:

1. Turn off Time Machine with the big switch in the Time Machine System Preferences panel.
2. Eject the old Time Machine disk, unplug it, and re-insert it to force it to re-mount as a regular drive.
3. Use Disk Utility to wipe the new drive completely.  Give it a single partition (I chose MBR since it’s a removable drive, but it shouldn’t matter Apple recommends using GUID partition maps to avoid Time Machine trouble!) and a new empty filesystem.  Time Machine requires the filesystem to be of the type, “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”.


OS X's Disk Utility has the ability to do a block copy of data between different-sized disks

4. Give the new drive a unique name so you can keep them straight when you’re copying.  I recommend calling it “New Time Machine Drive” or something equally unambiguous.  I called mine “Verbatim 160″ (even though it was still in the Maxtor case), while my old drive was called “Verbatim”.
5. Plug both drives into your Mac.  You should see both in the Disk Utility sidebar. See my example at right, showing both “Verbatim” and “Verbatim 160″.
6. Select the “Restore” tab in Disk Utility. This built-in OS X application can create a perfect block copy of your Time Machine drive, no third-party tools required.
7. Drag your old drive from the sidebar to the “Source” box.
8. Drag your new drive from the sidebar to the “Destination” box.
9. Click “Restore” and observe the warning – this will copy all data from your old Time Machine volume to the new drive, destroying its contents!
10. Wait a long while (mine took 4 hours) as the copy and verification progresses.


Aah, that's better - 50 GB of breathing room!

11. Once it’s done, unplug the old drive and turn Time Machine back on.  Make sure that it located the data on the new drive by clicking the Enter Time Machine item in the dock and looking at your old data.
12. Consider telling Spotlight not to index this new drive or at least the “Backups.backupdb” folder.
13. Once you’re satisfied that the new drive is working, you may want to use the old drive for something else.  If so, turn Time Machine off again, plug in only the old drive, and erase it with Disk Utility.  Don’t switch back and forth between the two Time Machine drives or you will become hopelessly confused!

So there you have it!  Move your Time Machine backup data with ease, using only OS X’s Disk Utility! This tool is amazingly good, making me wonder why anyone would need a third-party product.

Update: See Rolfje’s blog for streamlined Time Machine migration steps.

Problems

If the Restore process reports “Could not restore – operation not permitted“, you have to eject the Time Machine drive and re-mount it after you turn off Time Machine (see step 2).

If it still doesn’t work, try a reboot.

If it still still doesn’t work, try checking the “Erase destination” box in Disk Utility. This forces a block-level copy rather than just copying files.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk
This post was categorized as Apple. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Update: My MacBook Pro is now rocking a Toshiba 640 GB hard disk drive!

Read on for details on swapping a disk in a MacBook Pro, finding a great deal on the drive, and how to get Boot Camp and VMware Fusion to work again after you do it!  Surprisingly, this was the hardest part…

This post is part of my series focused on the MacBook Pro.

• Don’t Be Jealous Of The New MacBook Pros!
• Upgraded! 320 GB in a MacBook Pro!
• SanDisk ExpressCard Flash Media Adapter: Nifty MacBook Pro Accessory!
• How I Get 7 Hours of MacBook Pro Battery Life
• Panic! Green Light and MacBook Pro Keyboard is Half Dead!
• Low-Power USB Ports Haunt My MacBook Pro

Now for some particulars and lessons learned:

• The MacBook Pro is not an easy machine to install hardware in!  Although the RAM is readily accessible, all other components are sealed inside that sleek silver case, and it was not meant to be opened.  It is certainly doable for most people, provided they have the right tools, but closing it back up again is tricky!  There are 19 screws, both Phillips #0 and Torx T6, and the correct screwdriver is a must-have.  Apple must use some serious gorilla snot on the LED/IR cable to attach it to the drive inside, as it took much fussing to cleanly remove it.  And getting the front tabs “clicked” took some fussing and more pressure than I wanted to exert!
• I chose a Verbatim SmartDisk 320 GB FireWire/USB Portable hard drive as a donor.  It contains a very nice Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD3200BEVT drive that should be compatible with most mainstream notebooks since it’s just 9.5 mm tall.  This is a modern unit with two 160 GB platters, 3.0 Gb/s “SATA II” interface with native command queueing, and is fast and quiet.
• Why buy an portable drive instead of a bare hard disk?  Because Best Buy had the Verbatim on sale at $129, while the bare drive itself (sitting just down the aisle) was marked $179, that’s why!  Plus, the case can be re-used (see below).
• My MacBook had a 120 GB Fujitsu MH2120BH drive, which is a 2-platter 1.5 Gb/s SATA unit with modern perpendicular recording technology.  It fit nicely in the leftover Verbatim external drive case!  Sadly the case is flimsy compared to the very nice metal Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini I use on the PC side.  But at least the FireWire interface is fast.
• I used SuperDuper to clone the Mac’s internal drive and then booted with the FireWire drive just to make sure it worked.  Very nice!  Then I cracked the MacBook and swapped the drives.

You might also be interested in my post on upgrading the hard disk drive in a new Mac Mini!

Some notes in particular for folks like me who Boot Camp and VMware Fusion and upgrade their drives:

• I chose Winclone (an OS X app) to back up the Boot Camp partition prior to the drive swap.  Worked like a charm, creating a 22 GB image of my 55 GB partition.
• To keep everything “native”, you must use Boot Camp Assistant to repartition the new drive after the upgrade.  But Assistant requires you to use GPT to partition the drive, and Verbatim shipped it with APM, so I had to repartition it in Disk Utility before using it.
• I wanted to have two partitions – one for OS X and another for my Home directory.  This is standard storage industry best practice and what I do on my Windows machines.  But Boot Camp Assistant can’t handle this, and OS X doesn’t make it easy either.  So it’s all one partition now.  Boo!
• The new Boot Camp partition has to be as large or larger than the old one for Winclone to restore to it.  I wasn’t using all my space and wanted to reduce it but couldn’t.  So even though I “only” have 22 GB of data in my Boot Camp partition, I had to devote 56 GB to it.  I’ll resize it later if I can.  Either way, I’ve still got over 200 GB free in my OS X partition!  Update: A utility called Camp Tune claims to allow you to resize your Boot Camp partition.  I’ll test it and report back!
• VMware Fusion works great with Boot Camp partitions normally, but falls on its face when you replace the drive like I did.  Fusion kept trying to use an invalid configuration for the new Boot Camp partition, and there is no easy way to make it work again after you’ve changed it.  But I found the answer – you have to delete /Users//Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual Machines/Boot Camp, reboot into Boot Camp, and restart OS X before Fusion will correctly detect and configure the partition!  This is crazy stuff, but it works now!

All in all, I’m really enjoying the Mac.  Many OS X features are great (though some are lousy) and the hardware is superb.  But it is the ability to run Windows, both natively and using Fusion, that really seals the deal for me.  This really is the ultimate laptop, with a nice desktop UNIX, serious Windows performance, and now as much RAM and disk as anyone is likely to need.  At least until the 500 GB drives arrive next month…

Greg Ferro just did exactly the same thing, and I got a kick out of the name of his post!

Note: Some of these links include affiliate codes that help pay for this blog. For example, buying an Amazon Kindle with this link sends a few bucks my way! But I don't write this blog to make money, and am happy to link to sites and stores that don't pay anything. I like Amazon and buy tons from them, but you're free to buy whatever and wherever you want.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Upgraded! 320 GB in a MacBook Pro!
This post was categorized as Apple, Personal, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Although Hitachi was first to announce and ship a 2.5″ 500 GB drive, theirs used four platters, pushing thickness to 12.5 mm – too much for most laptops and external enclosures.  So Samsung’s announcement of their 9.5 mm two-platter SpinPoint M6 disk was greeted with enthusiasm, but it has taken months for actual drives to ship.  

All that looks to be changing, however, as at least one vendor is currently offering SpinPoints for sale in the United States, and OEMs are rapidly raising their hands.  Earlier this week it was familiar name Verbatim, who announced a 500 GB addition to their SmartDisk line.  Today it is Mac-friendly LaCie with a dual-drive bus-powered RAID 0 unit delivering a massive terabyte in a palm-sized package.

All this mobile storage goodness will continue pushing cost down and capacity up in the hot mobile market.  Where 120 GB was exciting last year, today we are seeing 200, 250, and even 320 GB drives in affordable notebooks and portable enclosures.  I missed snapping up a 320 GB Verbatim unit last week at Best Buy for just $139, but I expect to see a lot more at this bargain price over the next month or so.  That company claims their 500 GB drive will start under $300, and I expect it will drop 1/3 off that price on sale right off the bat.

Where does this leave supposed bargain NAND flash drives?  They’re not looking as attractive, with even the cheapest consumer units priced over $400 for a usable 60 GB.  Until vendors start hitting massive volumes, NAND will continue to command ten times the price per GB of old fashioned “spinning rust”.  With similar power requirements, expect NAND to remain a niche product for another few years at least.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Big Little Disks Are On The Way
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.