[ervier]

I was wondering how external hard drives or cd-writers perform in USB2.0 vs Firewire 400. Several years ago I had a PC with a SCSI cd-writer (8x read) and a IDE-cdrom player (40x read). The scsi-writer read as fast as the supposedly 5x-faster IDE-player. I heard that SCSI doesn't require CPU-usage, while IDE does, which could explain this.

How about USB vs Firewire? Does usb the job? USB2 should be a bit faster that firewire 400, but is that true in practice? What are your experiences?

[Dex13]

First I would go whats with most convenient if you have a mac and that is firewire.

[Cadaver]

Tests have shown that FieWire 400 is still faster than USB 2 despite the latter's theoretically transfer speed. USB has much more overhead than FireWire (packet based vs. streaming based is what I'm told).

I'm sorry I don't have a link for you to prove my comments, but a quick Google will find many for you.

Either way, FireWire 400 provides more bandwidth than a single drive could use anyway.

My external HD suggestion would be to get a dual FireWire-USB model. This way, you can use the FireWire interface on the Mac and the USB elsewhere if need be.

[The Ayatollah]

I've also seen that fw 400 has better sustained rates of transfer, and better overall rates.

[Captain Obvious]

But an enclosure with both. The price is not that much higher.