So I keep my media files on an external hard drive (I have over 200gigs of stuff and my mac mini only has a 160GB hard drive). Currently, I have a 750GB WD MyPassport that I have connect by USB. At my onetoone session yesterday, the genius that I worked with suggested that I use a usb hard drive as my time machine backup and get a FireWire hard drive for regular daily use. He thought I would get a better speed for watching video straight from the hard drive with FireWire. Thoughts? Is it really necessary? I kind of like the idea to free up a USB plug, but I wonder how necessary it is.
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hard drive--USB vs FireWire?
- Thread starter dellavoce
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If your mini has a FW800 port than it will be considerably faster. The FW400 less so. The big difference is FW is not CPU intensive for large transfers whereas USB is so if you are watching an AVI video that already is CPU intensive, adding to the burden with USB makes things worse.
You have been offered a false choice. You can connect multiple drive or other devices via FireWire. They can be daisy-chained. To expound upon flopicalcube's post, each FireWire device is a bus master. This means that each FireWire drive handles its own read/writes without CPU intervention. USB uses the CPU as the bus master. Every bit read or written by a USB device must pass through the CPU.
The takeaway message is to use FireWire for both drives. Suffice it to say, doing so will keep two USB ports free.
Firewire 400 or 800 performs much, much better than USB. Use Firewire whenever possible over USB.