I realize there are plenty of tests out there that compare FW to USB, and most of those probably show that FW is the faster of the 2. Even the test I ran proved that. My point was that the difference is not as significant as some of those test show and that other posters want you to believe.
You seem to be spending a lot of energy trying to convince the board that there is little or no difference between the two, but you're just plain wrong.
Firewire is faster in almost every conceivable way - your test was probably bottle-necked by something else on your system, hence the close result.
Firewire is faster, because it works like a P2P network and also because the firewire controllers are independent from the rest of the system bus. In other words, you could daisy chain 10 FW drives and transfer 10 1 GB files from one to the next at the same time, and still get a transfer rate in the range of 35MB/Sec. If you did that with USB 2, you'd get a transfer rate closer to 2MB/Sec, because ALL the data would have to go to the host bus, and then back again to the drives.
Even when there is only one drive involved, the FW drive will use less CPU, won't clog the system bus at all and will sustain it's transfer rates. For instance if you're encoding video to an external drive, you really don't want your CPU spending half its time keeping the USB bus happy. Why do you think almost all professional external media peripherals have a FW connection?
