Achieve Radically Better Firewire 800 Performance on Windows 7/2008/Vista x64

September 13, 2010 1 Comment

Microsoft is clearly ambivalent about Firewire (IEEE 1394). Windows 7 introduced a new IEEE 1394 stack but the performance remains abysmal compared to a Mac.

I have a Drobo 2nd generation device. My choice is to use slow USB 2 or a fast Firewire 800 interface. Unfortunately, large file copies over Firewire on Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 are slower than USB2. Worse, they can lock up the target device so that nothing else can access it until the file copy succeeds. I don’t have an explanation for why native Firewire support remains so lame but fortunately there is a free-of-charge solution to turbo-charge Windows Firewire performance to Mac OS X levels.

If you have a Firewire interface on your Windows 7 computer, do not hack around with legacy drivers and do not turn off the Windows write-cache buffer. Instead, download the latest ubiCore Firewire drivers for your version of Windows and install them. (Requires disconnecting all your Firewire devices and a reboot.)

Enjoy the painless 800 Mbps file copies.

Highly recommended.

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One Response to Achieve Radically Better Firewire 800 Performance on Windows 7/2008/Vista x64

  1. Gary S says:
    March 7, 2016 at 10:21 pm

    I know it’s been 5.5 years since you posted this, but I wanted to mention that this advice is still applicable to anyone using FireWire devices with Windows 10.

    Reply

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