Re: USB 2.0 vs. Firewire for hard drives
- From: dempson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (David Empson)
- Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2007 21:15:22 +1300
Michelle Steiner <michelle@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I've been looking at hard drives and wonder whether there is a
significant advantage to using Firewire rather than USB 2.0 to connect
it to the iMac.
As noted by sbt's followup, the big advantage of Firewire is speed. In
my experience, Firewire 400 is able to sustain about twice the
performance of USB 2.0 with the same hard drive. This is most noticeable
when copying large files, if your other hard drive is also fast enough.
If you are copying a lot of small files, it won't be all that
significant.
If you have a PowerPC Mac, the other big advantage is that you can boot
from a Firewire hard drive, but you can't boot Mac OS X from a USB
drive. (This isn't an issue for an Intel Mac.)
A final advantage is power. If you have a 2.5" hard drive, Firewire is
easily able to supply enough power to operate it. USB is borderline:
some drives are OK, some only work if you use a dual-head cable to get
power from two USB ports.
--
David Empson
dempson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
.
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