external firewire/usb2.0: will firewire support a 7500 rpm drive?

Lol, well, if you'd rather I didn't, please let me know :-) I only post to help... Firewire has a maximum bandwidth of 400 mbps while usb2 has a maximum bandwidth of 480mbps (both of these are theoretical maximums). Divide by 8 and you have the megabyte per second maxes: Firewire is around 50 and USB2 is about 60. These are not the max transfer rates of most 7200 rpm hard drives... However, hard drives rarely write or read at that speed. If you have the drive on an ATA100 connection, its max is 100 megabytes per second, but like I said, that is rarely reached. The average is a lil under half, so firewire and usb2 are both adequate for it and both faster than the 5400rpm drives in laptops. Those interfaces do not take advantage of the drive cache as much as a direct IDE connection does, though, so you do lose in that department. Post with more questions! Hope that helped! (and I'm sorry if my posting gets annoying.... :-()

Another point is that the fire wire in 888E does not provide power to an external drive , zip etc . ( read you manual Habib! heh! Heh! ) so use need an exteral power source for the firewire.

Ah, it seems that the sager people made is an unpowered 6 pin firewire port just so that you can plug in things that have a 6 pin firewire cable... That makes sense :-) I haven't had time to read through the whole manual, that is an unexpected twist. Thanks for the headsup Roy!

BTW, USB2 is not as efficient with hard drives because it does not operate continuously... It sends and stops and sends and stops whereas firewire is a continuous stream, so in practicality firewire is often perceived as faster (especially with streaming video and the like).

A repost that has some info that you may find helpful:

Here's an article from Tom's Hardware comparing 3 external hard drives and also comparing USB 2.0 vs. Firewire. Very helpful article, though I wish they had tested the exact same hard drive using the two different interfaces, so we can directly compare the speeds of the USB 2.0 and Firewire interfaces.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/mobile...0827/index.html

Especially enlightening remark that I want to point out. Though they found that the USB 2.0 HD seemed to have a higher maximum theoretical transfer rate than the Firewire drives (30Mb/s vs. 18 Mb/s), the Firewire interface maintains a consistent transfer rate from the beginning to the end of the test. As the writer put it:

"...don't be blinded by the higher performance levels of USB 2.0: even if up to 30 MB/s is possible, the USB protocol allows for interruptions to the data stream at all times. This is a killer for high quality video streams." The conclusion was that, "if real-time data transfer is important for you, then FireWire is the clear choice."

So for DV capture and editing, it seems that Firewire is the way to go. A consistent 18Mb/s transfer rate is plenty, since real-time DV capture requires a transfer rate of only about 3.6Mb/s.

~Kendalf

hehe, the quote you wrote from that article is exactly what I said :-) Phew, glad to hear Tomshardware backs me in that sense... Although the bandwidth they got was different than what I got by dividing by 8.... It must have been average as opposed to theoretical. Thanks for the linkage!!

lol, don't know if there are any girls... but I agree with your reasoning for getting a 5660. A drive of that size would require more power (and even if it doesn't REQUIRE it, I would recommend using it, lol). Good luck and let us know how it works out!

Just another coal for this fire. I was considering similar issues myself. Firewire does appear to offer better throughput, but the ability to power an external enclosure seems to be a big deal to me.

Upon searching around, I found a couple of different USB 2.0 enclosures for 2.5" hard drives (i.e. laptop drives, not 3.5" desktop drives) that would power the drive from the power on the USB port. As has already been observed, there is no power in Firewire port on any laptop that I've heard of.

For me, I expect to use my laptop MOST of the time with A/C power available. But, on the occasions when I'm running on battery, I would still want the ability to access my external drive. Not to mention, even if I am plugged into wall (or car) power, I would rather not have to plug in two things instead of one.

So, since it seems that you won't get the full benefit of an ATA/133 (or 7200 RPM) drive over a Firewire or USB cable, you might consider getting a laptop drive in an enclosure that will run off the USB line power instead.

Just another thought...

- Stu

An excellent point... and if you are looking for speed instead of size (like if a 2 gig hard drive that is just fast will do for you), you might check out some of the PCMCIA driver (if you have an 8886) because I think some of those are offered at faster access speeds. If anyone can confirm or deny this, please do so! Thanks!

Actually, most 6-pin Firewire ports on notebooks are powered, so you would be able to run an external Firewire HD off of the notebook power, just as you were planning to do w/ a USB 2.0 HD enclosure. I agree w/ you about the inconvenience of needing to plug in an external enclosure. I believe there are Firewire enclosures that use a notebook size 2.5" HD as well. A Sager notebook has a 6-pin firewire port and the manual seems to indicate that it isn't powered, but some people were checking that out and we're still waiting to hear the results.

~Kendalf

Most notebooks actually don't have 6 pin firewire at all, lol. The 8886 does, and I will check on whether it is powered or not asap. Good luck with your decision!