Transferring between firewire hard drives

I currently have a firewire 800 desktop hard, and want to move the contents onto a another drive. If the other drive I get also has firewire 800, I know I can daisy chain them together.

I was wondering, because firewire runs as peer-to-peer, and I read the devices are able to do low level memory access themselves. I was also wondering if they would be able to transfer directly from one drive to the other without involving the CPU? Is there a way to do this?

Phil G

Posted 2011-07-11T13:58:32.293

Reputation: 11

Answers

The CPU will definitely be involved in handling the transfer as the drive controllers use it. That you are using Firewire is only the conduit to transfer the data.

KCotreau

Posted 2011-07-11T13:58:32.293

Reputation: 24 985

P.S. The reason SCSI/SAS perform better, and are used in servers, is the controller card has its own processor to off-load most of the processing duties from the main CPU. – KCotreau – 2011-07-11T14:08:45.490

It is theoretically possible, but you'd have to have a Firewire drive enclosure that would clone another drive. To do that, it would have to have its own CPU (or similar, even if very low-powered) and a special firmware that could do so. (It'd probably need a "copy" button on the outside, too.) I don't think any of these exist, though I'd love to see one.

Cajunluke

Posted 2011-07-11T13:58:32.293

Reputation: 2 308