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usb2 v firewire 400/800 v usb3 v 1gig ethernet
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<blockquote data-quote="cwa107" data-source="post: 1355701" data-attributes="member: 24098"><p>Wikipedia has the specifics on all of the bus speeds. But technical specs often don't tell the whole story.</p><p></p><p>For example, while USB2 is rated for 480Mb/s, in reality it can't do sustained transfers at that rate. In fact, it's rare that it can even spike to those kinds of speeds. FW400 is so named because it's rated at 400Mb/s, but unlike USB2, it can actually sustain 400Mb/s, so in effect, it tends to be significantly faster in practical use. </p><p></p><p>For an external hard drive, FW800 has pretty much all the bandwidth you need for a traditional hard drive. Now, if we're talking SSD or a RAID system, you'll be able to saturate the bus - but typically, a standard drive will not be able to saturate FW800. </p><p></p><p>Gigabit Ethernet has a ton of overhead and will pretty much never do a sustained transfer at 1000Mb/s (as the name implies) on consumer-grade equipment (servers and enterprise-spec network gear and cabling are a different story).</p><p></p><p>USB 3 will be integrated in the Ivy Bridge chipset which will likely emerge on new Macs later this year. For now, Thunderbolt is the highest bandwidth external connection option out there on Macs (and outperforms USB3 significantly - though the two are NOT competing standards, but complimentary technologies).</p><p></p><p>If you just want to run backups to an external or maybe keep some large files off your internal drive, FW800 is your best bet at the moment.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="cwa107, post: 1355701, member: 24098"] Wikipedia has the specifics on all of the bus speeds. But technical specs often don't tell the whole story. For example, while USB2 is rated for 480Mb/s, in reality it can't do sustained transfers at that rate. In fact, it's rare that it can even spike to those kinds of speeds. FW400 is so named because it's rated at 400Mb/s, but unlike USB2, it can actually sustain 400Mb/s, so in effect, it tends to be significantly faster in practical use. For an external hard drive, FW800 has pretty much all the bandwidth you need for a traditional hard drive. Now, if we're talking SSD or a RAID system, you'll be able to saturate the bus - but typically, a standard drive will not be able to saturate FW800. Gigabit Ethernet has a ton of overhead and will pretty much never do a sustained transfer at 1000Mb/s (as the name implies) on consumer-grade equipment (servers and enterprise-spec network gear and cabling are a different story). USB 3 will be integrated in the Ivy Bridge chipset which will likely emerge on new Macs later this year. For now, Thunderbolt is the highest bandwidth external connection option out there on Macs (and outperforms USB3 significantly - though the two are NOT competing standards, but complimentary technologies). If you just want to run backups to an external or maybe keep some large files off your internal drive, FW800 is your best bet at the moment. [/QUOTE]
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