pmurraymusic :
Question for the room? I currently am running most of my plug-n-play drives via USB off of my iMac, but do all my audio editing/music tech stuff w/a Saffire Pro14 Interface through a Firewire connection; it's been running awesomely. I'm looking to purchase a couple of 1-2TB external drives, one of which I'd like to use as the main drive for all my audio data with the other as a backup. For the main drive, with my 2.0 USB port, would it make sense - and be faster - to purchase a 2TB unit w/3.0 capabilities? Or should I stick with Firewire? Happy to give more specs via e-mail so someone who could help. Thanks so much
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P. Murray
http://twitter.com/pmurraymusic
First question is do you have USB 3.0 ports? You need USB 3.0 ports to get USB 3.0 speed. Otherwise if you have only USB 2.0, you'll only get 2.0 speeds even with a 3.0 device.
It entirely depends on the performance of the drive(s) you're looking at. Lots of faster HDD's can hit average speeds of around 100-120MB/s; that exceeds USB 2.0 (and firewire 400) speeds, so you're better off going with 3.0. But on the other hand, if you're using "green" (i.e., low power, lower-performance) disks, they might top out around 50-60MB/s (or lower), which is fine for USB 2.0 (give or take some headroom on the bus). USB 3.0 is faster than firewire, but the limiting speed is probably going to be the disk.
It also depends on whether you've got firewire 400 or 800. Firewire 800 is around about as fast as most mainstream HDDs (give or take), with firewire 400 about as fast as usb 2.0. So if you have a firewire 800 connection, and a firewire 800 external hard drive, you're pretty much good to go in terms of speed.
For the purpose of ubiquity, if you have USB 3.0 ports on your system, I don't see why you'd want to maintain firewire moving forward. USB is on pretty much every device, whereas firewire isn't as common.