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Best way to move massive files
Let’s say I have a computer with multiple FW800 ports (USB 3, Thunderbolt, whatever – just as an example). I have two external drives with multiple FW800 ports. Would the files transfer faster if I chain the drives or plug each drive into it’s own port on the computer?
It seems like if the drives are chained, then the data would flow from Drive A to Drive B and the system would just tell it what to do. However, if the data has to go from Drive A to the CPU to Drive B, then not chaining them would be faster because you would only have data flow in one direction for each drive rather than read and write down the same pipeline (kinda like rendering to the same drive your source is on).
I haven’t done any tests, I’m just wondering if anyone knows.
Thanks!
Chris -
2 Replies
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Hey Chris,
Not quite sure how this is an OS X question, seems more like “Arrays and Raids”, but then you might hear from Herr Zelin and you’re not ready for that. Hypothetical situations rarely exist in the real world: “…computer with multiple FW800 ports”; like what? Mac or PC? Operating system? These are real world facts necessary in answering your questions. If you want a response, we need to know this.
Regardless, a direct connection, as you’ve noted, is your best bet (1 drive/1port). You’re still restricted to the max transfer of FW800 (100MB/s), and unless you have some extra software (Shotput Pro for example), you won’t be copying to more than one drive at a time.
It really comes down to what specific machine you’re working with, the connections, and the drives/raids you copy from/to. “Lets say…” is theortical, and there’s a tremendously practical reasoning at Creative Cow, FYI.. -
Well we have several machines, but they’re all running OSX 10.10.5, and we’re about to get new machines so that kinda prompted the question. I put it here because we’re OSX specific and don’t really care about PCs. With the variations I was just kinda looking for a rule of thumb rather than a definitive answer, but it sounds like you gave that so thank you very much. When possible I’ll use a port per device rather than chain if efficiency of data transfer is important for that task.
Thanks!
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