how is firewire different then USB2?

Planning on getting external harddrive, but this one comes with firewire as well as USB 2, so what does this firewire mean, I got Asusp4p board, and enough USB 2 ports but how do I setup firewire and how does it help?

This is the drive I'm considering is it good?
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2173668&Tab=11&NoMapp=0

firewire is faster than USB 2.0 so you'll have faster data transfer. you can get a pci adapter that will give you firewire if your current computer doesn't have it.

and the drive you're looking at seems pretty good. should be able to hold plenty of music, etc.

It depends on the firewire protocol... 1394B is 800 megabits/s where 1394 is 400 megabits/s. USB 2.0 is 480 megabits/s. That drive does not specify if it is 1394A, but I would assume it is?

Firewire support has been killed too, it was officially developed and supported by Apple. Know that if you go firewire then it's pretty much legacy. I don't know why they did this as it was superior for music and video transfers. That's not a bad price, but you could skip the $50 rebate by buying a barebones OEM 300GB HD and then getting a firewire enclosure, that way if you need to in the future you can switch to a USB 2.0 enclosure.

A lot of DJ's I know on weekends around my town use laptop's with the DJ program BPM they use USB 2.0 external HDD's along with a 24bit external sound card. I use Firewire still have done since I started DJ-ing about 5 months ago. 1 DJ I know debates saying there's no difference so I said technically no in a way depends on which version of Firewire I have. But I said I've never had a corrupted HDD yet using Firewire than I have using USB 2.0.

He agreed on sometimes that his USB drive plays up and he runs a disc check before he starts work. And I also said that to be honest I seem to see better performance in Firewire than when I had USB 2.0. This debate was 2 weeks ago I found out last Saturday he bought a 250GB E-HDD on firewire.

Firewire, IMO, is better. For the most part, I've seen it consume alot less cpu than USB2. But you might not notice a difference as from my experience, it would probably max at 30 mb/sec anyway (240 mbit/sec?).

You will not max out firewire, or USB 2.0 with todays HDD's, maybe with a 15,000 rpm SCSI drive, but even then you would almost need a multiple drive raid array for that....so don't worry about it. Go with whatever hdd you like the best.

redwraith94 said:

You will not max out firewire, or USB 2.0 with todays HDD's, maybe with a 15,000 rpm SCSI drive, but even then you would almost need a multiple drive raid array for that....so don't worry about it. Go with whatever hdd you like the best.

Click to expand...

Yes you will max out USB. First of all, the maximum theoretical bandwidth is only 480mb/s. That translates to 60MB/s. That may seem sufficient to get close to the sustained transfer speeds of most modern hard drives, but the fact is that in real life, 30MB/s would be considered a good sustained transfer speed for USB. 15% of the bandwidth is automatically used up for system overhead. I have personally never seen USB transfer speeds reaching 40MB/s.

The thing that is better about firewire is that it gets better real life transfer speeds.

This is a review of an external hard drive that has USB and Firewire.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/10/20/external_storage_with_a_mac_design/