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External HD, Firewire or USB 2.0?

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Gawd
Joined
Sep 25, 2003
Messages
535
So I got a external Maxtor 160gig HD

was wondering what would be better/faster, firewire or usb 2?

My HD supports both

thx.
 
Oh and right now the file system for this external harddrive is a FAT32. Should I format it to NTSC?
 
If by any chance you want to use it with linux, or something else odd, leave it with fat32, otherwise i'd change it to ntfs.

The theoretical max speed of usb2.0 is slightly faster, but(if i remember correctly) firewire has a built in controller that takes the little bit of load that accessing a device creates off of the cpu. Both are very fast in either case.
 
Firewire has less overhead so even though USB 2 has 80Mb theoretical advantage, Firewire is faster in reality. Or you could go Firewire 800 if your MB supports (not sure that any do at the moment though).....
 
Personally i'd reccomend USB 2.0 for the simple fact that it is way more compatable that firewire. It's backwards compatable with USB 1.1 so you can use your drive with almost any other system you want/need to.

I have a USB 2.0 Enermax enclosure and the transfer I get using that drive is actually slightly faster than the internal 4200 RPM HDD so it's not so terrible. I transferred 4 GBs of MP3s to the drive from the internal HDD on the laptop in just over 4 minutes.
 
Really doesn't make much of a difference which you use, from what I've read FireWire 800 tends to edge out USB 2.0 but by a pretty insignificant margin... Doubt CPU utilization is much of a concern when you're doing backup duties and such too.

About whether to re-format it... Dunno really, I know thumb drives don't tend to like getting reformatted out of FAT32 at all but external HDDs shouldn't have any issues with it. Check if the included software gives you the option before doing it in windows if anything...
 
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