Does external bluray writer need anything beyond USB 2?

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I have an internal LG bluray burner in my Windows pc that I would like to use with an iMac. I did some hunting and found external boxes that would work to house a 5.25" optical drive. However, one sales rep was telling me that I would be limited by USB, and should at least get a firewire box.

I'm fully aware that Firewire is faster than USB 2, but USB 2 maxes out at around 480 Mbps, right? Optical drives don't get anywhere even close to that speed, do they? I don't mind getting a firewire box, but it's a $100 box vs a $30 box, and if the extra $70 isn't doing anything for me at all, I might as well put it into something else. If we were talking hard drives and not optical drives, then it would be a different story.

Am I understanding this correctly, or way out to lunch? Are there any benefits, other than throughput, to going with Firewire?
 
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Firewire is arguably more robust but I run my Blu-ray drive to my iMac using USB and never had an issue.
 
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FWIW, since the BD video spec is a max of 54Mbps, you're fine with either :)
 
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It could be, I'm going from memory. USB 2's MAX spec is 480, but in practice it's much lower. It's a shared bus design. Either way, from the wiki link


BD Video movies have a maximum data transfer rate of 54 Mbit/s, a maximum AV bitrate of 48*Mbit/s (for both audio and video data), and a maximum video bit rate of 40*Mbit/s.
 
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Lastmboy
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It could be, I'm going from memory. USB 2's MAX spec is 480, but in practice it's much lower. It's a shared bus design. Either way, from the wiki link


BD Video movies have a maximum data transfer rate of 54 Mbit/s, a maximum AV bitrate of 48*Mbit/s (for both audio and video data), and a maximum video bit rate of 40*Mbit/s.

ok. Thanks. I'll never actually be playing a bluray movie on it, anyways (I have a console player and 60" plasma tv for that). I just use them for backing up data, and didn't want the burns to die because USB 2.0 couldn't keep up.
 

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