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View Full Version : USB 2.0 / IEEE 1394a External Hard drive

feedback
26th July 2006, 16:35
Is there any real benefit to having both USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394a in an external HD?
foxyshadis
26th July 2006, 17:05
Macs didn't have USB support until a few years ago. And firewire is usually faster than USB2 (regardless of raw numbers), although not by much.
UofC
26th July 2006, 17:10
Yes, you have the benefit of either to choose from. I have not seen much difference in speed but have had read I/O problems with the firewire for one reason or another.
CWR03
26th July 2006, 23:14
USB 2.0 is faster than the transfer rate of a hard drive anyway, so it would only seem to be a matter of convenience (i. e. having a firewire port more accessible).
feedback
27th July 2006, 04:35
Macs didn't have USB support until a few years ago. And firewire is usually faster than USB2 (regardless of raw numbers), although not by much.
Got the below quote from Wikipedia on USB 2.0 versus firewire...
"Despite USB's theoretically higher speed, in real life benchmarks the actual speed of firewire hard drives nearly always beats USB 2 hard drives by a significant margin".
For some reason, the raw numbers I suppose, I always thought USB 2.0 was faster in real world applications. I guess not...

Regards to All, :)

P.S. I should not have Assumed...I should have verified!:D
foxyshadis
27th July 2006, 07:03
Has something to do with the signalling, sync codes, and such. See http://www.1394ta.org/Technology/About/Firewire_FAQ_PC.pdf

CWR, I can easily get 45-60MBps out of an cheapo-depot external drive (if it was internal), when reading raw audio or video (or huffyuv) for processing, which is significantly higher than USB2's real-life transfer rate of around 35MBps. (Firewire 400's isn't much better at 40.)