Is Firewire much faster than USB 2.0 for a Western Digital MyBook drive?

[bollweevil]

Computer: MacBook Pro purchased in November 2008

External drive: Western Digital 1 TB MyBook, purchased in November 2008

Cable options:

A. USB 2.0

B. FireWire 800 9-pin (on MacBook Pro side) to FireWire 6-pin (on external drive). I don't know if the WD MyBook is FireWire 400 or 800.

USB 2.0 is intolerably slow. Will FireWire be faster? I would have to abort a copy operation which has already taken 7 hours by USB, though nothing has been written to the destination drive yet. It is still "estimating time remaining". "Preparing to copy" took 6 hours, it has been "estimating time remaining" for 1 hour. The target drive has not spun up at all yet, it is still totally blank.

 

[blueroom]

The drive is FW400.

 

[SDub90]

You will probably notice a significant improvement with Firewire 400 over USB 2.0.

 

[mkrishnan]

For those kind of big drag and drop copies, the difference is at an extreme, and it's not uncommon to see improvements of 200-300% (see). USB2 is pretty close to FW for small files (the peak speed is technically slightly faster), but when you're talking about gigabytes of sustained data transfer, there's no comparison. Anyone who owned a firewire iPod and then got their first USB iPod can attest to that one.

 

[jnpy!$4g3cwk]

USB 2.0 is intolerably slow. Will FireWire be faster?

I don't know about this particular drive, but, in similar circumstances, I got about 2X with FW400. USB 2.0 is an embarrassment.