Whats better, 1394 or USB2?

[AtomicGuY]

I'm wondering whether I should make the purchase of a USB2 interface card or just stick with my basic USB1 motherboard hookup and my 1394 firewire interface which currently sports 4 80GB Maxtor Hard Drives.

Comments welcome.

[UnseenMenace]

No idea whats better, but out of interest I read some where that WinXP supports firewire but will not support USB2... I dont know if this situation has changed either.

I would consider firewire to possibly be the one I would choose as its been around a lot longer and as such may have better driver and product support

[mudguts]

4x 80 gig drives??!! wow! did you stripe these in raid? 1394 has a top throughput of 100 megabits per sec. Even if these are in raid..I doubt they would exceed that. USB 1 has a 12 megabit per sec throughput but I dont know about USB 2. Is it even out yet? ...Im a little behind on the news lately.

[rugby]

I would stick with 1394 (firewire, ilink). 1394 has a maximum throughput of 400mb/sec which is 50Mb/sec. USB2 has a throughput of 480mb/sec which is about 50Mb/sec. HOWEVER, 1394 is MUCH more polished through the efforts of Apple and SONY. You can hook up DV Camcorders, and soon a lot of stereo components will use 1394 for inter-connects. USB2 is Intel's half-assed attempt to steer people from 1394 because Intel can't stand people not using their stuff. Intel wants the licencing fees associated with USB2. Also, firewire2 will be out within the next year and will have throughput of about 800mb/sec, which is 100Mb/sec.

Also, the advantage of moving all your stuff to USB2 isn't there, all firewire hard drives are really just ide drives slapped in an external case that has a firewire->IDE bridge inside it. The bridge was recently updated to allow for higher speed access because it was bottle-necking at around 17Mb/sec. It now allows full saturation of the firewire bus at around 50Mb/sec, but no drive can saturate that except for RAID systems.

I hope this helps.

[AtomicGuY]

unfortunetly, no. 1394 doesnt support raid as far as I know. But I do have them all blocked as one drive. It's really something when you see that you still have 290GBytes left of Hard Drive space. I got my 2X 60GB 7200rpms on the raid channel thou.

mudguts (Jun 30, 2001 03:19 a.m.):
4x 80 gig drives??!! wow! did you stripe these in raid? 1394 has a top throughput of 100 megabits per sec. Even if these are in raid..I doubt they would exceed that. USB 1 has a 12 megabit per sec throughput but I dont know about USB 2. Is it even out yet? ...Im a little behind on the news lately.

[mudguts]

[quote]rugby (Jun 30, 2001 08:46 a.m.):
I would stick with 1394 (firewire, ilink). 1394 has a maximum throughput of 400mb/sec which is 50Mb/sec.

Yeah your right Rugby..sorry bout the misinformation Atomic.

[Fiz]

If you have an extra pci slot, I would say go ahead and get the usb2 card and run both of them. Think about it, the VCR is a tried and true method of watching movies, are you going to tell me that because DVD is new that you wouldn't try it. I say give it a shot and see what happens, that's what I am going to do. I am sure that usb2 will come into it's own in time.

Fiz

[JuDgE_DrEaD]

i know 1394 is more widely popular among u guys but isnt usb2 supposed to be speeds up to 480mbps, around 40x faster than usb? if so then wouldnt you rather be better off to stick with usb2, even if it is made by Intel