OS X :: Longevity Concern - Noticeable Speed Difference Between USB 2.0 And Firewire?
Apr 6, 2010
I'm looking to replace my current external drive with a newer, larger drive. My current drive is connected via Firewire and houses my iTunes library, plus movie files, documents, etc. I'm trying to decide between a portable drive (the Western Digital Passport, for example), and another desktop drive (like say, this one [URL:..]Questions I have:
- Is there any reason to be concerned about longevity when using a portable drive?
- Does a desktop drive typically perform better than a desktop drive?
- Is there a noticeable speed difference between USB 2.0 and Firewire?
I know this topic has been gone over several times, but I'm still having trouble deciding on which to get in a new 15", 2.8Ghz MBP - 5400/500GB, or 7200rpm/320GB (or 500, really). I'll be using the machine largely for graphic design, but also for various other tasks as my main computer. I've heard the faster drive IS a noticeable difference, but it also drains battery life and runs hot. There doesn't seem to be a consensus on this anywhere. Is the 7200 worth it?
I did some searching on this topic but couldn't really find any info. I have a 2006 24" iMac with a 250gb HD. I just upgraded the ram to 3gb and have done a fresh install of snow leopard but my machine still seems to struggle with applications and accessing files. I was looking at replacing it with either a WD Caviar Black or a Samsung Spinpoint 1tb. the extra space is not my biggest concern, just wondering about performance increases?
I have a 1,1 Mac Pro. Am I going to see a good difference in performance? I mainly do motion graphics and Photoshop related tasks. Gaming is secondary. Just wondering what your guys' thoughts are and if it's worth the price upgrade.
Aside from more screen real estate which is not that important to me, will i really notice the difference between std and hi res glossy in the 15" MBP? I am coming from a late 2007 core 2 2.2 ghz system that I mostly used for photoshop work, email, web surfing and for watching movies once in awhile, so I think for me the deciding factor comes down to will the the hires display have a significant enough difference over the std display on my photos?
i have a 1.5 Mbps AT&T DSL connection, and multiple speed tests show a download speed of 1.2 Mbps (and 200 Kbps upload). when i download files, such as software updates from Apple, various podcasts, and even Silverlight from Microshaft, the speed is always between 140 - 160 Kbps. i contacted AT&T, and the rep said it was because of buffering by the servers i was receiving the files from. is this a reasonable explanation? is this an accurate use of the term "buffering"?
I'm sitting here thinking I made a mistake by being cheap and just upgrading the base model to 2 GB when virtually everyone else is going for 4 GB... I do realize that this is mainly because most people choose to upgrade themselves, and then there's no point in not installing 4 GB. The thing is that I don't think I would benefit at all from having 4 instead of 2 GB of memory, since I won't be doing any "heavy" work on it whatsoever.
I might use Photoshop now and then, but that's about it, and that works just fine on my current MacBook with 2 GB ram (white 2006 model). Also, my memory usage most often shows that I have 1,2 GB of free memory, which isn't even close to "maxing" it. I've been looking for benchmarks comparing these two configurations, but I couldn't find any. I know that it's quite easy to upgrade it yourself later, but I'd rather avoid it...
I recently had the 2.8Ghz 24inch imac with 2Gb memore and 320Gb hard drive with the ati graphics but had a display problem so returned it but my current pc is so slow i need a new computer now so i'm looking at the 24inch 2.66Ghz model but what sped difference will i see in sped from 2.8-2.66 and will the nvidia graphics be better, worse or the same as the recent ATI graphics and is the memore a bigger improvement with now 4Gb ddr3
I'm trying to decide whether to buy the express or the extreme.
I will only be using it for web surfing with my macbook pro.
But in the near future I might buy a wifi skype phone (which is g).
If I'm using the express, that means my macbook pro connection will change from n to g (because it is not simultaneous as in the extreme) when the wifi phone connects.
Will shifting from n to g change drastically my internet speeds in my macbook pro?
If my download speed is 300 Kb/s and my upload is 30 Kb/s with "n"; how much will that change when shifting to "g"?
How much speed difference is there? Battery I take it is almost double in real life, actually using the MBA. I get barely 3 hours with moderate use on my Rev B and I take it most people get close to 7 with similar usage?
Is it worth the extra cash to go up to the 2.13? I know it's a small amount, but that could be a new mouse, or a super drive. I've seen tests that indicate the rev b 1.86 is actually faster than the new 2.13. This will be my only personal mac. I'm a graphic designer (adobe cs4) but I don't do much design work on my personal computer (I have a nice iMac at work). The usual facebook, email, web browsing, YouTube
I have a Mackbook pro and I need to set the firewire speed to use a camera which works with 400 Mhz, in my mackbp the system info sayd 800Mhz.How can I change the firewire speed?
i have a 1.5 Mbps AT&T DSL connection, and multiple speed tests show a download speed of 1.2 Mbps (and 200 Kbps upload). when i download files, such as software updates from Apple, various podcasts, and even Silverlight from Microshaft, the speed is always between 140 - 160 Kbps. i contacted AT&T, and the rep said it was because of buffering by the servers i was receiving the files from.
Does this mean that an external hard drive with firewire 800 will be no good to me? Or does mean that the last firewire device was only capable of 400 mb/sec?
For almost the last year I have been using an Airport Extreme on 2.4b/g and and Airport express in my room to extend my wireless network. I also have a usb hdd configured to back up my macbook using time machine. Well I have a new roommate moving in and he has his own extreme and two expresses.
I have some questions on what would be the best way to consolidate our networking devices. I considered us selling our extremes and getting the new time capsule so both of our macs can use 5ghz while my girlfriends dell uses the 2.4.
Is there a noticeable speed difference between time capsule backup vs hard drive to extreme connected via usb?
I would believe having your backlit keyboard on max would kill the life span of the led lights? curious to know if anyone has it on max majority of the time to have the laptop look fancier rather then those who use the backlit accordingly to prolong its life time.
But in the cases for those who do set the backlit keyboard on max for a long time (speaking of months, even years) any issues with it? any led lights or keys breaking or stopped working?
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7) Wondering if people have had any good/bad experiences with cooling pads. I plan to use this for some moderate gaming and I feel like it would be a worthy investment to get one of these, both for noise and for longevity.
I know that it is an old single processor, first of the Power Macs, legacy machine and OS. I have gone through all various check system/disk evolutions with Apple and TechTool Utilities.Also, when I have a software glitch, I can never get the Send To Apple report to "send". I get a message that reads something along the line of 'not being able to connect to Apple'. Why, the legacy problem again? If so, I am suprized that I get iTunes and Safari updates.
Info: PowerMac G5/1.8 GHz old 1 cpu 2003, Mac OS X (10.5.6), Using Macs since Skinny Mac, and Apple IIs before that
I've been looking at a number of different Firewire 800 enclosures to use with my new Mac Mini and I have seen lots of complaints with almost all the enclosures that I have investigated, including the Newertech MiniStack v3 which I thought should be a good one. A recent enclosure I came across that I haven't seen any bad reviews about is the Icy Dock (MB559UEB-1S). I'd like to know if others are using this and what they think about it. The next question has to do with the type of hard drive to put into the enclosure. Is it worth getting a high performance drive, or will the Firewire 800 interface be the bottleneck even with an average speed drive?
Does anyone know if apple let's the 17" Gpu run faster since it probably has better cooling than a 15"? I remember Mr. Jobs saying that when they put the 9400m into the MacBook Air they had to slow it down due to cooling issues with the Airs smaller case ( something like 4x faster than the previous intel gma vs. 5x in the 13")
Made me wonder if the same is true in reverse when they have better cooler and more space to play with. Any links or MHz speed on this would be awesome.
recently installed and flashed a sapphire 4890 into my mac pro 1,1.Installed Quartz update for 10.6.4, running dual displays no problems BUTTTTT.......something seems fishy about my open gl scores.Most of the people I've seen on here are scoring over a 1000 when benchmark is check in open gl viewer
Is it true that when we charged 100% battery and it says on AC power, does it LITERALLY do what it say? i mean the power of Macbook pro is not provided by battery but by magsafe instead. is it?last thing, leaving the Macbook connected to the working magsafe isn't add numbers up to cycle count right? and is it okay to charge the Macbook pro all the time and only using it when we could't find AC power outlet?
