Firewire Speed on the mac mini

Does anyone know the max fireWire speed for the mac mini? Im lookin to buy an external Hard drive. Fire Wire is faster than USB 2.0 right? Im after something upto 400 Gig. Recommendations please. Oh and it needs to be quiet as i'm making a home audiophile sound set up and the hard drive will serve as a library of all my CDs.

rosso said:

Does anyone know the max fireWire speed for the mac mini? Im lookin to buy an external Hard drive. Fire Wire is faster than USB 2.0 right? Im after something upto 400 Gig. Recommendations please. Oh and it needs to be quiet as i'm making a home audiophile sound set up and the hard drive will serve as a library of all my CDs.

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FireWire 400 is aprox twice the speed of USB 2. If your looking for a good external drive check out the LaCie, they make great drives. I would recommend the LaCie d2 triple interface external. It will do USB 2, FireWire 400 and FireWire 800. Great drives, fast, solid, well built, quiet. They come already formated for the Mac, i have a 320 gig model and I love it. They come with all the cables you need for the different interfaces. Just go to:

http://www.lacie.com

And check em out.

Thanks for the quick reply james. I Think i'll go for this one:

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10586

400 gig should be enough for me for the time being. Also does the mini support the FireWire 800?

Thanks

James said:

FireWire 400 is aprox twice the speed of USB 2. If your looking for a good external drive check out the LaCie, they make great drives. I would recommend the LaCie d2 triple interface external. It will do USB 2, FireWire 400 and FireWire 800. Great drives, fast, solid, well built, quiet. They come already formated for the Mac, i have a 320 gig model and I love it. They come with all the cables you need for the different interfaces. Just go to:

http://www.lacie.com

And check em out.

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That is not true, FW400 has a maximum possible throughput of 400 Mbit/s, while USB2.0 has a maximum of 480Mbit/s, which is, theoretically, slightly faster.
However, due to the different way those two interfaces work, the average throughput of FW400 is in most cases a bit faster than USB 2.0, especially when there are more than one device connected to one interface over a hub. The iMac has no FW800, and FW800-capable devices are quite rare and more expensive. As the data throughput is still limited by the harddisk itself, the gain from FW400 to FW800 is marginal for the moment...

USB1.1 .......... 12mb/s
USB2 ............ 480mb/s
Firewire400 .... 400mb/s
FireWire800 .... 800mb/s

Now in all tests I've seen, FireWire 400 returns faster results than USB2, but not by leaps nor bounds. And yes, LaCie makes some good cases. Nice and clean looking, but use Maxtor and Western Digital hard drives.

I recommend finding your own case(this one looks cool). and buying the hard dive separate from pricewatch.com. there are some nicely priced 250giggers

FireWire 400 is faster than USB 2.0, but saying twice as fast isn't correct.

I can only go by what it does on my system. What it does in a test lab some place is another story. All i can say is when i got my LaCie i transfered almost 14 gig of files using USB2 and it took almost twice as long to transfer as it did when i transfered the exact same files a second time using FireWire 400.

So, at least on my particular system transfering these exact same files FireWire 400 was darn close to twice as fast. Your right about the difference between 400 and 800, the time gain was nowhere near the difference it was between USB2 and FireWire 400.

Maybe i have a problem with my USB2 in order for it to show such a difference between it and FireWire 400, but at least on my system there darn sure is that much difference on those transfers. Hmmm, does the PM have a USB1 plug that I may have used?

Firewire is DEFINITLY faster than USB 2.0. However, they both serve different purposes; USB supports many more prepherials then firewire, so it is important to be able to use both. That is why the LaCie Triple Interface Drives are so great.

For those of you who like to use tests to prove you are right here's one for you. :

http://www.barefeats.com/usb2.html

rosso said:

Thanks for the quick reply james. I Think i'll go for this one:

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10586

400 gig should be enough for me for the time being. Also does the mini support the FireWire 800?

Thanks

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Great choice i think you will really like it. LaCie makes a very nice product that works just great with the Mac. I really don't know about the Mini and Firewire 800, i don't have one, but i would suspect the answer would be no, however i think you will find the FireWire 400 to be quite fast. There really, at least on my system, isn't that much speed difference between the 400 and 800, certainly not like the difference between USB2 and Firewire 400.

The difference btwn 800 and 400 is marginal.