Firewire 800 THRESHOLD mb/s on Pentium 4 Generation?

[pixelutmedia]

Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor 2.80 GHz, 512K Cache, 533 MHz FSB
2x1GB 333mhz PC2700 SODIMM

My old Dell Inspiron 5100 has a PCMCIA card slot, and I have an old Lacie Firewire 800 PCMCIA card which also has 1 port 400.

I plan to use a RAID 0 external enclosure that has both the 400 and 800 ports. My drives are two 750GB 7200 drives.

I'm basically editing old SD video that I plan to do a massive archive collection. My question is am I good with the 400 port alone or should I attempt the 800 port connections? I'd assume that the Inspiron 5100 wouldn't take advantage of the 800mbs protocol?

 

[popatim]

Whats your plan to backup this massive archive collection that would be stored on the Raid 0 array?

If you have 800 use it. It is quite a bit faster then 400 and the Raid0 won't be bottlenecked nearly as bad.

 

[pixelutmedia]

I was doing research last night that I should buy a used eSATA PCMCIA card which would have better results than the Firewire 800 card.

I’m just curious. Is the Cardbus 32-bit lane really able to deliver the suggested marketed speeds of 1.5gbs versus FireWire 800 speeds? I know they are both different protocol but I read that eSATA has a “direct connection” type vs USB 2.0 or FW. These Cardbuses run about 10 bucks on eBay. The enclosure also has an eSATA port.

I plan to do some tests of archiving in AVI.

 

[popatim]

No due to overhead. They typically can achieve 100-115MB/s which is faster then a speedy FW800 could achieve (~70MB/s).
Its up to you if its worth the investment.