Slow Transfer Speed On External Firewire Drives

[markav28]

Hi.

 

I've searched far and wide for a solution to this problem and nothing I have come across works. Basically, the read and write speeds of my firewire drives are horrible.

 

I am running a vanilla installation of 10.5.5 on a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R motherboard. I have 3 firewire cards: A SIIG PCI-X Firewire 400 card, A SIIG PCI Firewire 800 card, and An off-brand PCI-X Firewire 400 card. I've tried all three... I've tried every possible combination of two... I've tried each one individually.

 

I've also tried three different firewire drives on every possible combination of cards. One drive is a G-Tech, one is a LaCie and the third is an off-brand enclosure that I stuck a spare drive in.

 

In all instances I always get an average of about 8MB/sec for both read and write. I used the AJA Kona System Test program to determine this.

 

Several people have had success using the kexts from 10.4.9. This certainly helped for me, but it's still not up to where it should be. With the 10.4.9 kexts, I get a write speed of 12MB/sec and a read speed of about 32MB/sec. The read speed is fine with me, but the write speed is obviously very slow.

 

I also tried the kexts from 10.4.7, but that just causes all sorts of errors on boot.

 

All of the threads I could find on this topic end with no solution. There's gotta be somebody out there who figured this one out, or could maybe help me troubleshoot it and settle this once and for all.

 

 

Update: If use only the PCI Firewire 800 card (not PCI-x) along with the 10.4.9 drivers, I get normal transfer speeds. But I can not for the life of me get anything acceptable using either of the PCI Express cards. Could this have something to do with the PCI-X bus? Or the Firewire driver's interaction with the PCI-X bus?

 

Thanks!