Quick Computer Question- Firewire 400 vs. 800

[excane]

I do a lot of video editing and 3D animation on a high-end dual quad core Intel system.

My current setup has 2 external Lacie drives (1TB each) and the system is smoking fast...just wanted to know different peoples opinions on connecting the drives by me buying an internal Firewire 800 card vs. the 400 which I already use...?

Big difference in speed, etc?

[Chunk-O-Funk]

The 400 and 800 refers to how many megabytes it can do a second. So, the 800 should be twice as fast theoretically.

[excane]

Yes, I'm aware of that. I guess I wanted an opinion on "real world" speed from people who actually use 800 for similar purposes.

[fokof]

Check the read/write speeds of your HD, not a lot of HD gives 400 m/s or 800 m/s for that matter....

Here is an interesting comparaison of 800 ,400 and USB 2.0

http://www.barefeats.com/mbpp10.html


(of a specific CPU but it gives an idea )

[warnergt]

The 800 and 400 figures are megabits per second; not megabytes per
second. Most hard drives on the market today can easily handle these
rates. In fact, SATA 300 drives have a 3 gigabit per second interface
(i.e. 3000 megabits per second).

Firewire 800 has a theoretical limit that is twice as fast as Firewire 400.
Will you get double the performance? There are too many unknown
factors to answer this.