Mac Book Pro firewire 800 performance

Nearly a year ago, I wrote up some stats about firewire 400 vs firewire 800 vs local disk on my 17" 1.33ghz Powerbook G4. I thought I ought to revisit those numbers with the 17" mac book pro (core duo, not core 2 duo). So, here they are:

Interface	17" MBP	17" PB G4
Local Disk	1:02.44	1:51.80
FW 800	00:34.27	00:32.12
FW 400	00:53.55	00:53.74

These are the times to create 4 512mb files; writing out a total of 2 gb of data. I timed all three interfaces on the MBP 4 times, and the above numbers are the averages.

The obvious thing that jumps out here is that the 7200 RPM drive option in the MBP is a good deal faster than the 4200 RPM drive that I had in the powerbook. The other numbers are pretty comparable. The FW 800 in the powerbook appears to have been a smidgin faster than the FW 800 in the mac book pro, but I wouldn't view that as being all that meaningful; probably within the reasonable noise in the experiment. I'm surprised that the FW 400 numbers are so close.

The target drive for both the FW 800 and FW 400 experiment is a La Cie Bigger Disk Extreme 1Tb. The drive is fuller than it was when I did the test on the powerbook g4, but given that the firewire 400 numbers are so close, I doubt that that had much of an effect.

Conclusions - FW-800 is clearly faster than FW-400, and the FW performance of the MBP is comparable to that of the 17" aluminum powerbook G4.