USB or FireWire? (External Hard Drive)

[Bengt77]

Even with FW800 my time machine backups are still pretty slow...

That's because Time Machine is a toy. It's not a real backup solution. For that, you need an application like SuperDuper!, Dantz Retrospect or Carbon Copy Cloner (see a somewhat dated comparison). With these, you can make a bootable clone of your hard drive. It would be best to have two external drives (or a dual drive enclosure). One drive for a full (bootable) backup of your system, for emergencies. Another one for day-to-day (maybe even hour-to-hour or even minute-to-minute) Time Machine backups. Those two combined will save you tons of time when the time comes your system hard drive dies.