External Hard Drives: USB or Firewire

spinner

spinner

I was given today a terrabyte sized external hard drive. It is made for mac, but it is USB. I am used to Firewire or the I/EEE version of Firewire.

Is there a difference in USB and Firewire? Am I okay or do I have to expect anything different because the external is USB?

I got this as payment for a job I edited. Nice of that guy... :yes:


-- spinner :cool:
 
I would assume it's USB2, which is really fast. You're good. Firewire is pretty much obsolete, and as far as I know, is only used for capturing DV.
 
Cracker Funk said:
I would assume it's USB2, which is really fast. You're good. Firewire is pretty much obsolete, and as far as I know, is only used for capturing DV.
Click to expand...

The box says: USB 2.0

Is that what you mean? (...and I will be capturing some digital video...)


-- spinner :cool:
 
CF you're behind the times, 3.0 is the new thing now. :)
 
Yeah, the vast majority still have usb 2. It's fast and good for your average file sizes.

But for the amounts of data we have to transfer (raw files, uncompressed footage), it can take quite a while.

It's a nice present/payment, Spinner. We always need more storage.
 
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spinner said:
The box says: USB 2.0

Is that what you mean? (...and I will be capturing some digital video...)


-- spinner :cool:
Click to expand...

Yeah that's what he means. Most devices are still 2.0.

And in my 2 cents- I rarely encounter firewire anymore. As others have said, it's sort of obsolete now. All of my external drives are USB 2.0 and work quickly and well.
 
Still, you can make it faster disabling security messures.
When you unplugged a drive in the old days, you had to unlink the device from the PC. Now, you can just pull out the HDD, because of those security messures, which is good but f**** up your transfer speed.
You can disable this, and get much faster speeds but if you accidentaly unplug your hardrive...well, you are pretty much fucked.
 
USB 2.0 (480mbs) can be slightly faster than Firewire 400 (400mbs), but Firewire 800 (800mbs) is WAY faster than both.

eSATA is better than both of those at 1200mbs.

USB 3.0 has a theoretical speed of close to 5gbs, or 5000mbs.

Thunderbolt is a whopping 10gbs, or 10000mbs.

Once you're at eSATA or faster, you really notice the speed of the drive itself. 5400rpm drives are horrible, stick to 7200rpm at any cost haha. A large chunk of data being transfered from a defragged disk, you won't see much of a difference, but when it's pulling bits of data from all over the drive it's way slow.
 
Spinner's on a mac. The USB2 will work just fine. Firewire is faster at sustained transfers, but the USB2 will do just fine. If it causes a problem, use the USB for storage of your old projects, to clear out your external Firewire drive... then use that as a working drive... that's kind of how I've done it.
 
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