[The Godfather]

Several years ago, when USB2 was still new, Mac users preferred Firewire for various reasons, specially for the sustained bandwidth. I can find USB2 enclosures for my 2.5"HDD to $8, but Firewire enclosures for $30 or more. Is USB2 still inferior to Firewire in 2007?

I am thinking of using this drive for backups, about 2GB transfer per week.

[mduell]

USB2 has no problem sustaining 20MBps, but it's not going to sustain the 60MBps that it's "rated" for. Firewire 400 will buy you about 30-35MBps, but at a significant price premium as you've discovered.

Is it going to be a big deal if it takes you 2 minutes instead of 1.5 for your weekly backup? I doubt it.

Newegg has 2.5" USB enclosures for $6 or 7; but if you can get one locally for $8, that's great.

[CharlesS]

If you have a PowerPC Mac, you can boot from FireWire but not USB 2.0.

[shifuimam]

Aside from CharlesS point about how PPC Macs can't boot off USB, FireWire appears to be going out the window for most applications.

Apple doesn't even support FireWire data transfer on their own iPods anymore, which is too bad because my iBook has USB 1.1 and FireWire 400. The only use for FireWire that I can think of anymore is for DV camcorders, which still appear to use FireWire for DV data transfers - possibly because FireWire has a faster sustained data transfer rate, which is good when you're transferring an hour of video in realtime.

If you have older Macs (e.g. PPC ones), get a combo drive case - USB 2.0 and FireWire. You'll cover all your bases that way.

[slpdLoad]

You can have my FireWire 400 and 800 drives when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers.

[Gamoe]

Well as far as external hard drives go, eSATA is the superior candidate hands-down, but unfortunately, most of us don't have that option, and no Mac comes with it built-in.

As shifuimam pointed out, it's best to get a drive with both FW and USB 2.0 if you have older Macs around. That way you can use the drive and boot off it with either PC (though not under the same format, I believe).

I'm considering getting an enclosure as well, though I was also considering a dual-drive (RAID-like) enclosure as well. Most of those tend to have ONE USB and/or ONE FW port, though, and I'm wondering if that doesn't effectively cut the bandwidth for the drives in half since you're using ONE connection for both drives.

Anyway, I'd go for both FW and USB, unless you don't have any older Macs or don't care about compatibility with them. As mentioned, Apple seems to have forsaken FW for reasons unknown (though I suspect the Intel switch), so alternatively I would go with USB 2.0 for compatibility reasons.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Gamoe 

I'm considering getting an enclosure as well, though I was also considering a dual-drive (RAID-like) enclosure as well. Most of those tend to have ONE USB and/or ONE FW port, though, and I'm wondering if that doesn't effectively cut the bandwidth for the drives in half since you're using ONE connection for both drives.

Of course it does; and both busses are slower than the sustained performance of current drives, so you're really digging yourself in a hole performance-wise.

I've started buying eSATA+USB2 enclosures for performance and ubiquity.

[Gamoe]

Originally Posted by mduell 

Of course it does; and both busses are slower than the sustained performance of current drives, so you're really digging yourself in a hole performance-wise.

So most dual/RAID FW/USB enclosures are both more expensive and further bottleneck transfer speeds? I'm not sure I see the point.

Originally Posted by mduell 

I've started buying eSATA+USB2 enclosures for performance and ubiquity.

Hopefully Apple starts adding an eSATA port (or two) to new Macs soon.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Gamoe 

So most dual/RAID FW/USB enclosures are both more expensive and further bottleneck transfer speeds? I'm not sure I see the point.

The real world performance is about 35MBps for FW400 and 20MBps for USB2. You might be able to eek out 40-45MBps for FW400 and 30MBps for USB2 with just the right chipsets, conditions, packet sizes, etc.
The "average" new drive (most anything in the 160-750GB range) can sustain 60-80MBps at the beginning of the disk and 35-45MBps at the end of the disk for sequential reads/writes. Put two together in RAID0 and you can pretty much double that.

[Gamoe]

Originally Posted by mduell 

Put two together in RAID0 and you can pretty much double that.

I'm afriad I'm too chicken to run drives like that with no redundancy, especially with a higher probablity of failure.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Gamoe 

I'm afriad I'm too chicken to run drives like that with no redundancy, especially with a higher probablity of failure.

With some of the more recent RAID1 implementations, they can give you double the read (but not the write) performance of a single drive by sharing the reads between the drives.

[GORDYmac]

I haven't bought a camcorder in years, but isn't FireWire (iLink) still used for transferring video to the PC/Mac?

[slpdLoad]

It is on all the camcorders I've ever used.

[ecking01]

Yeah firewire still owns the camcorder market. It won't die for a while if at all.