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Ext Hard Drive: Firewire v USB
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harrisjamieh
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Mar 9, 2006, 03:08 PM
 
I am currently using a LaCie 1TB hard drive at home for capturing about 24 hours of DV footage using my iMac. The hard drive belongs to my school, and once I have captured it, I have to take the drive back to school to edit the footage.

The hard drive is firewire 800, 400 and USB2, and on my iMac I am using FW400. I now want to get my own external HD, as my 160 in my iMac is not all that much when editing 20 odd hours of footage. My question is, am I going to see any noticable difference using a drive with FW400 or a drive with USB2?

I know USB2 is technically faster, but FW has sustained rates, but seeing as USB2 drives are quite a bit cheaper than FW drives, I would rather get a USB2. Will I be able to use a USB2 drive for video capture? Is it going to perform ok?

Cheers for any help

Oh, BTW, this is the drive I am looking at :

http://www.dabs.com/ProductView.aspx...1&v=3#infoarea
iMac Core Duo 1.83 Ghz | 1.25GB RAM | 160HD, MacBook Core Duo 1.83 Ghz | 13.3" | 60HD | 1.0GB RAM
     
hickey
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Mar 9, 2006, 03:12 PM
 
I vote for a FW drive, but thats only because Ive never actually used a USB drive. So Im anxious to hear others opinions on this.
     
cmeisenzahl
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Mar 9, 2006, 03:38 PM
 
I believe that a USB 2 drive will connect at nearly the speed of FW, maybe even a touch faster for bursts. But take that w/ a grain of salt as I'm certainly no expert.

I will add that you should be sure to get a disk that spins at least 7200 rpm (I think Seagate may make some 10,000 rpm drives) since you're doing video. An 8MB disk cache would be helpful too. Also, while it shouldn't make a difference, connect the external USB drive directly to your computer, not through a USB hub. Just my 0.02.
     
mduell
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Mar 9, 2006, 05:36 PM
 
The USB chipsets found in most Macs are terrible... stick to Firewire.
     
ghporter
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Mar 9, 2006, 07:35 PM
 
If you have both available, try them both and see which one works best for you.

Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
     
packetattack
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Mar 9, 2006, 11:27 PM
 
Originally Posted by mduell
The USB chipsets found in most Macs are terrible... stick to Firewire.
Yep.. I have found firewire to much more reliable on the Mac AND the PC since I switch between the two all the time. The newer mega drives (1 TB) are the worst.

MikeS
     
SSharon
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Mar 9, 2006, 11:38 PM
 
I have two external HDs and both are in combo usb2 fw enclosures. I tested their relative speeds with hundreds of mp3s and large 700mb video files. In every test firewire was faster but in the case of the mp3s they were about the same. the usb bus uses processor cycles as well while the firewire bus controls things on its own. it is much more reliable and at least in my case faster.
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tooki
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Mar 10, 2006, 06:09 PM
 
Originally Posted by mduell
The USB chipsets found in most Macs are terrible... stick to Firewire.
The USB chipsets found in Macs are the same ones used in PCs. The differences in performance are pure driver implementation issues.

tooki
     
mduell
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Mar 10, 2006, 10:08 PM
 
Originally Posted by tooki
The USB chipsets found in Macs are the same ones used in PCs. The differences in performance are pure driver implementation issues.
Then it sounds like they improved their drivers for the Intel Macs (I assumed it was just from the hardware change).

February 6th, 2006 -- USB 2.0 is FASTER on the Core Duo iMac than on the Quad-Core G5 Power Mac! One of our readers was pondering whether the speed of USB 2.0 might be improved on an Intel based Mac. So we ran some QuickBench tests using a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 and Wiebetech SuperDriveDock+ (USB2 + FW800). Here's what we observed:
Quad-Core built-in USB2 = 11MB/s READ, 11MB/s WRITE
Quad-Core with Aaxeon USB2 card = 15MB/s READ, 11MB/s WRITE
Core Duo iMac 2.0 built-in USB2 = 18MB/s READ, 14MB/s WRITE

- Barefeats
     
cgijon
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Mar 14, 2006, 03:23 PM
 
Firewire, hands down
     
tooki
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Mar 14, 2006, 04:54 PM
 
Originally Posted by mduell
Then it sounds like they improved their drivers for the Intel Macs (I assumed it was just from the hardware change).
Since USB was invented by Intel, it's entirely possible that they tuned some aspects of the USB standard for characteristics of x86 CPUs. (This is entirely speculation.)

That, or Apple just got off its butt and wrote some better drivers.

tooki
     
mountainash
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Mar 26, 2006, 11:58 AM
 
Firewire is better. For many technical reasons. Basically it is smarter, and wastes less time with frivolities. It is faster in the real world. If you are dealing with gigs of data, then the difference is big enough to justify spending the extra.

Here you go:
http://www.usb-ware.com/firewire-vs-usb.htm
http://www.barefeats.com/usb2.html

Should settle your mind
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tooki
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Mar 29, 2006, 02:16 AM
 
Those tests do not separate out the effect of drivers. The fact is, a given drive with both USB 2 and FW interfaces will be faster on FW than on USB on a Mac, and faster on USB than on FW on a Windows PC. This has been shown repeatedly.

tooki
     
ghporter
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Mar 29, 2006, 09:45 AM
 
Shazam, some of those "frivolities" are things like bus and power management; USB implements (or can, depending on the drivers) much tighter controls on what device gets how much bandwidth and particularly which device gets how much power. Firewire can allow itself to be overloaded by power-consuming devices, but USB CANNOT.

Of course for large files firewire is generally superior because with large files it can often reach higher throughput speeds on a given platform, which is why it's the medium of choice for just about all the digital video applications (digital video cameras, etc.). Fast bulk transfer does NOT make for an "overall superior" medium. There are a lot of other considerations.

Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
     
Eug Wanker
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Mar 29, 2006, 10:34 AM
 
I have a couple of combo Firewire/USB2 enclosures, and for both, Firewire is noticeably faster than USB 2. I don't know if it's the chipset or if it's OS X's drivers, but the sustained transfer rates are up to 50% slower on USB 2.

The other important point you shouldn't forget is that most Firewire enclosures include more than one Firewire port, so you can daisychain devices. Plus, you can't boot off USB 2 on Macs.

EDIT:

It seems BareFeat's test results are similar to my own:

     
mduell
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Mar 29, 2006, 01:42 PM
 
Originally Posted by tooki
Those tests do not separate out the effect of drivers. The fact is, a given drive with both USB 2 and FW interfaces will be faster on FW than on USB on a Mac, and faster on USB than on FW on a Windows PC. This has been shown repeatedly.
Not always; I've used a Lacie drive on a Windows box that was faster on FW than USB2, and there are a few models of iPods (the final generation of each line that supported both) where USB2 is faster than FW with Macs.

The benchmark from barefeats suggests is much more about chipsets than drivers; the G4 and G5 should be about the same with FW800 if it was just a driver issue.
     
applesnapple
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Mar 31, 2006, 12:04 AM
 
go firewire. when i used my 3g 20gb ipod, it synced with my computer and got all the songs so quickly, but its painfully slow with my 4gb nano(which uses usb 2.0).
     
tooki
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Mar 31, 2006, 02:34 PM
 
Again, the interface is not the only factor. Flash memory is often slower to write to than hard disks. Plus the flash controller is another factor. The interface is only one of many factors, and unlikely to be the bottleneck in the case of the nano.

tooki
     
zen
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Apr 2, 2006, 04:50 PM
 
My advice would be not to buy an all-in-one drive from Iomega or Lacie or whatever - just too expensive. Buy a hard drive and buy an enclosure, and if you ask nicely the store might even put the two together for you.

I bought a 200GB drive and a Firewire/USB enclosure (I only run it with Firewire) for the same price as a 60GB Lacie Firewire drive. And if you get a dual Firewire/USB enclosure, you can try both and see what suits.
     
   
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