external firewire400/800, USB & esata hard drive enclosures

[Sossity]

I have read that firewire or esata is faster than usb 2.0.

I have a 2010 macbook pro with snowleopard on it & have a 7 port ac powered usb hub hooked up to it. If I plug in 1 or more external hard drives into the hub & have them working together/transferring files, will there be a big slowdown?

right now my hard drives are in just usb 2.0 enclosures. Would it be worth upgrading their enclosures to firew wire - esata? would I feel a performance difference?

the hard drives are sata & others are ide.

can anybody suggest some good enclosures that will dissipate heat well? I sometimes run my hard drives for up to 2 hours at a time.

one hard drive is for photo & video files, one is for my itunes & music & one would be for video editing.

 

[xyzzy-xyzzy]

How can a macbook pro do eSATA?

FWIW, and coincidentally, about a few hours before your post I posted something similar here but mine is related to the mac pro. No replies to my post as of yet at the time I am replying to yours.

 

[softwaredevelop]

Try g-tech

The g-tech drives are in a metal enclosure and dissipate heat well

 

[miata]

How can a macbook pro do eSATA?

The 17" MPBs have express card slots that take eSATA cards. A nice option for MBPs with FW800 is the FirmTek SpyderHub. I have one and it works great.

 

[gr8tfly]

I have a couple of Rosewill FW800 (purchased from Newegg) enclosures 1TB drives (one WD, other Seagate). They're fanless and run relatively cool. They're on 24/7, with varying usage.

Throughput on FW800 is noticeably faster than USB2. On large files, I've measured almost 3x faster (going to/from the internal SATA 7200RPM drive in my UB MBP).