USB 2.0 vs Firewire 400.....your opinion?

A

arcsbite

Guest
here's the deal
I'm currently using 2 lacie big disk extreme 500gb drives for file storage (video, itunes library ect)

I have just bought a Lacie 500gb USB drive (the small porche version) as a back up...

...The firewire one's power the disks down when not in use, not that big a deal but it's getting really annoying having to wait 20 seconds for it to power up again if I want to listen to an itunes track after itunes has been idle for a while.

The USB one seems to have no lag, it seems to run all the time and is just as quiet as the bigger, slightly older Big Disk Firewire ones.

....now, I can replace my Big Disks with the smaller porche ones, but I can only get the USB ones, what is your opinion?

Do I stick with the lag and keep the FW400
or do I go for USB 2.0 and loose the lag?


...is there a big difference between FW400 and USB2.0?


thanks.
 
Firewire 400 has faster sustained speeds.

Also, it's not the drive shutting itself down, its Mac OS X shutting down your drive for you (to prevent wear and energy waste). If you don't want your drives to ever spin down, you can disable that setting in System Preferences.

<assumptions> I imagine the USB one doesn't shut down because USB drives wouldn't support that without some sort of driver specific to your enclosure (USB is software-controlled whereas FireWire stuff is hardware controlled). </assumptions>
 
dpaanlka said:
Yes. Also re-read my post as I added some extra stuff.
Click to expand...

ahhh very helpful, thanks!
I checked energy saver and you're right there's a box ticked about powering down
I'm reluctant to uncheck it as I do want my drives to power down after a while of not being used,, shame I can't set it to an hour or something oppose to the 10-15mins it seems to be at.
 
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