External hard drives?!

[Radar]

I just bought the 500GB drive Maplin are doing for £100. If you register for their offer leaflet, you can get a few more quid off it.

It's a reasonable-sized USB2 unit. Performance? not sure - rsync from our server over Gig-E to it did 70GB in 4-5 hours or so...

<boast>I just did a 146 gig backup in 4 hours via 1394</boast>

But like i said, God knows what throughput USB would give me as I use a USB keyboard, mouse & printer and I'd imagine a load of polling slowing things down.

Now I just need to checkout 1394b cards and I should be able to double up throughput again (unless I hit some other limit)

 

[ramjamclub]

Any thoughts about this statement

USB 2.0 has a theoretical speed of 480 Mb/s
FireWire 400 has a theoretical speed of 400 Mb/s
From experience I know that Firewire is almost 25% faster.
In practice the usb 2.0 dosen't get above 4/5 Mb/s
whilst FireWire 400 is upto 5/6 Mb/s
We are talking about cardreaders

Seen on a forum. Any thoughts about the validity of this statement

 

[Bob_the_lost]

Firewire is better for sustained transfer, USB2 is better for short bursts from many devices. Google has all the details you want.

 

[lobster]

USB 2.0 has a theoretical speed of 480 Mb/s
FireWire 400 has a theoretical speed of 400 Mb/s
From experience I know that Firewire is almost 25% faster.
In practice the usb 2.0 dosen't get above 4/5 Mb/s
whilst FireWire 400 is upto 5/6 Mb/s
We are talking about cardreaders

Seen on a forum. Any thoughts about the validity of this statement

you missed FireWire 800 with transfer rate of 786.432 Mbit/s