Really, I have!
A client of mine has been having a problem with their monthly backup of their Time Machine volume taking too long. They’ve got a large external drive attached by USB and it’s backing up just about 1Tb each month. Problem is, it’s taking more than a full work day. Which makes everybody nervous because it means that all the company’s technological eggs are in one bucket for a day.
So, I ran some comparisons backing up just over 10Gb of data to a drive connected via USB, FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 (and for interested over my LAN to a NAS).
As predicted, the FireWire 800 interface was quickest but not by much. Which is what surprised me. And the LAN copy was the slowest of all.
Now, I’m certain that over the time needed to copy 1Tb we would see improvements in performance so that FireWire was noticeably faster than USB but I found it interesting that FireWire was not by any means significantly faster when copying just over 10Gb.
Oh and in other news. As of this moment, I have no dandelions in my front lawn. Well, none that you can see. I’ve been out there for weeks, every day, digging them up. It looks great. Now if it would stop raining for long enough so that I can cut it, that would be great, thanks. It looks like a farmers pasture right now. Swaying in the breeze.
That’s it for now.