Will FireWire really improve my setup?

[upthespurs]

I have an iMac 27" i7 2010 and I am currently running iTunes from 3x1.5 tb external USB drives. iTunes can be a bit laggy atntimes loading artwork etc and I also find that streaming to my ATV 2 can take a bit of time to buffer. I have a 40 mega Internet connection so this shouldn't be the problem.
I am thinking of upgrading to 2x3 tb drives and I'm not sure if going for the FireWire 800 option is going to make a big difference. I can't seem to find any real information on actual speeds on YouTube etc. Thanks for your help in advance.

 

[TraceyS/FL]

I only run fw400 on my drives, and when I have to use the USB one it kills me how slow it is. I imagine fw800 would really rock!

 

[dndlnx]

Not sure if there'll be huge difference just accessing songs from iTunes. But I would get it anyway for the transfer rates.

I would never use USB 2 for any serious external drive. Especially ones at that capacity.

 

[jljue]

FW400 & FW800 end up having faster transfer rates over USB2 because they don't have the CPU overhead that USB requires. I still edit video with a hard drive with FW800, so I know that you should be able to load iTunes media faster with the extra bandwidth. How much faster is to be determined by the size of your collection.

 

[88 King]

I currently have both USB and Firewire external drives attached to the imac. I really don’t see much difference in loading 720P video between those two drives.

I'm more annoyed by the hard drive spin up times.

 

[upthespurs]

Thanks for the replies. I think I'm going to go with the Western Digital 6 tb mac edition. It's a bit expensive at 425€ tho but a 2 tb version is 189€ so it makes sense to me. Gives me FW800 and clears up 3 External hard drives all at once. Hopefully I will see an improvement in loading times and all will be just great.

 

[bumzo1]

I have 2 1tb fw800 drives hooked up to my mac for video editing and they work great. I actually did a speed test of my different drives and the external drives are just marginally slower than my internal 7200rpm drive.

 

[dndlnx]

Those RAID enclosures from OWC are pretty sweet, the "Mercury" aluminum ones. They have like ten different connections (lol) and are super nice. They are one of the few out there, that have FW800 and eSATA.

Just a suggestion.

 

[Papanate]

FW 800 will smoke the USB port. So yes it is a vast improvement for you to get FW 800 external drives. You will also see a huge reduction in the time it takes Time Machine to complete ( if you backup to an external drive now).