usb 2.0 or fw 400 for external drive?

In my opinion i prefer firewire but that's just me.

Doesn't the USB 2.0 still require external power?

I know a few Firewire Drives that need their own power but there are ones that just use the one cable

If you can get one with just one Firewire cable then it would be better for moving it around (not worring about that extra cable)

Definitely go for the FireWire. Even though the FireWire peaks at 400 Mb/s and the USB 2.0 can go to 480 Mb/s, they use different transfer protocols and in real world tests a sustained data transfer will be much smoother and quicker over FW that USB 2.0.

Now if I could only find the link to the benchmark tests to prove it.

Darwin said:

Doesn't the USB 2.0 still require external power?

I know a few Firewire Drives that need their own power but there are ones that just use the one cable

If you can get one with just one Firewire cable then it would be better for moving it around (not worring about that extra cable)

Click to expand...

It depends on how much power a device draws. I've got a LaCie mobile HD that doesn't need an external power source.

rewsd the first post, he has the drive but wants to know which way to connect it, and add one vote for firewire.

There was a thread a while back comparing the two and I believe, firewire was the winner. But I don't know when it comes to a device which has both connections.

Hector said:

rewsd the first post, he has the drive but wants to know which way to connect it, and add one vote for firewire.

Click to expand...

You're right, sorry. It was a bit too early on Sunday morning . I altered my post accordingly.

what it comes down to is that firewire ports have there own dedicated decoder chip thingys to do all the work and they have a sole purpose and can handle 400mbps but with usb 2 it makes the cpu do all the work and using the cpu to do something is always slower than dedicated hardware

Either one is fast. There both good. I like firewire better, but usb is more common.

If you are going to play songs or video or store large files (say a meg or more) then firewire is much faster. If you are going to store smaller files (a meg or less) then usb2 blows 1394 out of the water. Ususally people's files are fairly large, so most people are better off with the firewire.