Thread: Testing Firewire 800

Most Firewire 800 cards use the Texas Instruments OHCI driver that's built into XP and Vista, we still had reliability issues with Vista. Owners of XP may also need to make the registry modification 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 Uust 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.