Quote:
Originally Posted by Elgin Clock
USB 2.0 speeds actually rival Firewire speeds as of now, but I'm sure that will change as the technology of Firewire increases and USB is left in the dust.
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Any Firewire drive worth its salt will leave even USB 2.0 in the dust.
As any of my experience with external hard drives, and moving vast amounts of files (video editing!), Firewire will always out-preform USB 2.0 devices. As such, I only purchase Firewire external hard drives, except for one portable 60G one I bought just for my laptop (which sadly doesn't have a Firewire port).
Even if on paper the speeds of USB and Firewire are comparable, you can have proof of the increased performance of Firewire in that every Video Camera always uses a Firewire port for full definition video capturing, whereas USB 2.0 is usually only used for lower quality web streaming. (Capturing HD video is VERY bandwidth intensive, and you need a high capacity drive to be able to keep up with the incoming video.) I've never been able to capture HD video in real time onto an external USB 2.0 hard drive*, but I've never had any problems with capturing onto a Firewire hard drive.
* One of my 320G external hard drives can be connected by either USB 2.0 or Firewire. So as a test when I first purchased it, I ran a test of seeing how long it took to transfer about 50G of captured digital video to the drive via USB 2.0, and then over Firewire. After the testing, I found that there was always a bottleneck with the USB 2.0 connection, where the hard drive would read/write the data faster than USB 2.0 could deliver it. Using the Firewire connection proved that the the Firewire port could deliver the data just as fast as the hard drive could write/read it, eliminating the bottleneck. That drive now stays connected only via Firewire.
In conclusion, for small files or non-bandwidth intensive applications, USB 2.0 works just fine, as it's more common on computers. But trying to run a full-fledged intensive application such as Inventor or 3DSMax from a flash drive would most likely frequently encounter the data bottleneck with USB 2.0. (Although you CAN install regular versions of applications on Firewire external hard drives; all my games for my desktop are all installed on an external Firewire hard drive.)
EDIT: Elgin, on Apple computers, the Firewire 800 protocol can currently transfer data at up to 3.2 Gigabits/sec, whereas USB 2.0 is only 480 Megabits/sec, with Firewire certainly leaving USB in the dust!