USB 2.0 vs Firewire

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roninblade

[H]ard|Gawd
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Sep 22, 2004
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Im looking for a external hard drive for my Dell 9300 Laptop. The question i have is..... Is it worth an extra $40 for Firewire? I will be storing movies, music, apps, games, porn, everything on the hard drive and streaming it from the hard drive. I was also be burning ISO's from the hard drive. Thank You.
 
Hell no. This is storage you're talking about. USB 2.0 is fast enough. That said, I've never actually run a game from external, but I play media all the time -- it kind of sounds weird that you'd actually install anything to external instead of on local drive (it's not a good idea anyway).
 
yea my hard drive has a 100GB internal, i wont need to install anything on it. I read reviews where movies and music would skip if you ran it from an USB 2.0 External like the Mybook.
 
I have a USB 2.0/Firewire 400 external casing, a nice one that ran me about $40 last year when I got it. I put a Maxtor 300GB ATA133 16MB buffer drive in it one time and did a test of moving some DVD VOB files across to it.

USB 2.0 speeds were in excess of 38MB/s writes, Firewire 400 speeds were 42MB/s.

HDTach 3 measured the drive as follows:

On USB 2.0, it had 51MB/s peak transfer, average of 39MB/s. The peak was because of USB 2.0's upper limit, so it was maxing out the interface basically.

On Firewire 400, it had 49MB/s peak transfer, average of 44MB/s, basically in line with the USB 2.0 speeds.

So from that testing I realized it didn't really matter which one I used as both were basically the same speeds and because of the hard drive used I knew that wasn't the limiting factor. USB 2.0 is just fine, and you'd be hard pressed to find a PC anywhere on the planet less than 5 years old that doesn't have at least a USB 1.1 port on it.

Can't say that about Firewire ports. :(

Hope this helps...
 
i have a 320gig mybook connected via usb and there is no skipping when i play movies from it. as for games, i have never installed a game directly on the mybook but i have mounted my backup iso's via daemon tools and installed them from the external HDD without issues.

id say go for the external, i hav'nt had any usb bandwidth problems with mine
 
I Have a 250GB MyBook (USB2 connection), and playback movies from it all the time without any skipping. Transfer (copy) speeds from it directly to my ZVM is as fast as from my computer internal hardrive.
 
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