[B Gallagher]

Hello all,
I'm looking at getting an external hard drive, which I'm planning to connect up to my Mac via Firewire 400. I can get either a 750GB SATA or IDE HDD for the same price, and can get a case which suits either as well.

With SATA being faster than IDE, will there be much of a speed increase of transfers via Firewire? Or will the bottleneck from the Firewire mean that they'll both run at the same speed? Also, are there any other advantages that a SATA HDD has over an IDE one?

Thanks.

[CharlesS]

The only advantage is if you have an eSATA card in your computer. If you do, you can get an eSATA enclosure, and it will be much faster than FireWire or USB. In that case, you'd need an SATA drive - otherwise, it doesn't matter whether you use SATA or PATA, since they're both faster than either FireWire or USB.

Well actually, the cables for SATA are a little thinner, and there's no jumpers to worry about. So there's a small ease-of-use advantage in favor of SATA, if you care about that.

[mduell]

Firewire is the bottleneck by a long shot; IDE vs SATA doesn't matter. The price tradeoff is basically flat, with cheaper enclosures but more expensive drives for IDE.