External drives faster via firewire.

I have 2 External drives I have had for some time now using USB and since i've been having problems with them via USB disconnecting and stuff. I contacted Western Digital about them and they suggested I plug them directly into the computer, Well my USB ports are full so I had to use the firewire ports. one of my hard drives has nothing but music on it and I use it more so I used the 800 for it and the backup drive is using the 400. I opened itunes and played some stuff and i didn't get the pinwheel while itunes loaded the songs like I did with USB. Is this just my imagination?

Firewire is faster than USB! FACT!

- Simon

I just copied a file over from my computer to both drives. the 800 is significantly faster than USB that is a definite, the 400 however doesn't seen much different.

FW 400 should be faster. It is a steady rate that equals/exceeds USB 2.0's peak performance.
But, as you've experienced, FW 800 leaves them both behind. That's what I use for my Time Machine backups.

I keep my music on an external and use it a lot more then i have a big drive that is a backup of everything, I use it but not as much. so I put the 800 on the one with music. i copied files from my computer to that drive earlier almost instant.

Image from MacWorld

When I DJ with my MBP, I always play my music/songs/Logic 9 projects from my external FW800 HD. I never save them on the internal system HD.

Buzzard2010 said:

Firewire is faster than USB! FACT!

- Simon

Click to expand...

In the real world, on a Macintosh, a Firewire 400 external hard drive can be roughly 50% faster than a USB 2.0 external hard drive.
USB 2.0 versus FireWire

A Firewire 800 drive might be faster still, but this is often limited by the speed of the hard drive mechanism itself, so you can't depend on seeing a huge speed difference between a FW400 drive and a FW800 drive.

See:
http://www.usb-ware.com/firewire-vs-usb.htm
http://www.firewire-1394.com/firewire-vs-usb.htm

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Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting
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