whats better for an external hdd usb or frewire ? notebook use

[ZL1]

Hi

guys whats better for an external hdd - usb or firewire ? notebook use
I heard that usb eats up more cpu resources than firewire, is that so ?


please advise


Thank you
Dan

[RamonGTP]

It is so... Firewire uses less CPU resources, and although on paper USB2.0 appears to be SLIGHTLY faster than firewire, in practice firewire hard drives actually outperform USB2.0... Only down side is that firewire drives tend to be a little more expensive than USB ones.

[Steve R Jones]

Borrowed this pretty interesting note from a friend on another message board:

"Something to keep in mind with external solutions like USB 1.1, USB 2.0 or Firewire... No matter which of these interfaces is used, a drive attached via one of these methods for the most part will fall far short of its performance/speed capabilities relative to if it were connected internally (via IDE cable). Even in the best case none of these interfaces will come close taxing the newer 7200rpm ata100/133 drives. For the most part they won't even push the limits of an older 5400rpm ata33 type drive. In particular, writing to USB/Firewire attached drives causes a big fall off in speed relative to native (internal) attachment. A USB 1.1 type enclosure/attachment is REALLY bad, with transfers of only a couple MegaBytes/sec. USB 2.0 comes in second (even with its higher max bandwidth relative to Firewire), maybe giving MB/sec rates in the mid to upper teens. Firewire does the best on reading, giving something like rates in around the 30MB/sec mark, but falls way off when writing to (like USB 2.0) the mid teens. You can see the hit one takes when you campare the numbers with the numers for an internal drive, averaging in the mid forties (MB/sec) for reads and the mid-upper twenties for writes.


If you really do want to go the external route and still want as high (camparable) speeds as possible, maybe consider one of the external SATA solutions. They have ones that will take IDE drives, and convert the protocol to SATA for communication to/from the host."

[Dputiger]

I think his notebook still would need to support SATA for that.

And ZX1, you might've combined all this into one post. You've got three VERY similar topics in three different threads. Its confusing and it actually can make it harder for people to address all your points.

[Roy]

I'm pretty sure USB can power an external drive. I don't think PCMCIA can, and I'm not sure about firewire.

[RamonGTP]

USB is 5 volts with a MAXIMUM of 500mA... So unless the drive only requires 2.5 watts (highly unlikely) the drive WILL need an external power source. Firewire can drive more power hungry devices than USB, but still not enough for a hard drive.

[ZL1]

guys these things come with a power supply
I was wondering mostly about CPU usage (since on a laptop thats already a problem)
speed is actually secondary



Thanks
Dan

[ZL1]

Originally posted by RamonGTP
It is so... Firewire uses less CPU resources, and although on paper USB2.0 appears to be SLIGHTLY faster than firewire, in practice firewire hard drives actually outperform USB2.0... Only down side is that firewire drives tend to be a little more expensive than USB ones.

Ive been reading some reviews and they all pretty much agree with you so I'll probably go with firewire

my only problem now is that the 120gb maxtor Id like comes with usb only



Thanks
Dan