Originally Posted by
goalie
if i may piggy back on my beer-buddy's
thread....
i have an i-mac (intel/ 500gb hd) and i've just inherited goalie-mom's mac g4 667mhz laptop (it's a dinosaur but hey, it will run leopard
and for web and e-mail on the road, that's all i need but i digress....)
my current back-up drive is my old lacie fw drive but it doesn't have enough space to back up both machines so with that, i'm going to need a new back up drive (1tb) to handle both machines and was wondering about speed-which is faster
both machines have fw and usb ports with the imac usb 2.0 and both fw 800 & 400 and the laptop usb 1.0 and fw800.
firewire?
usb (is it backwardly compatible and how much slower is usb 1.0 vs usb 2.0)?
ethernet connection to my wireless router?
First, regarding the OP's query -- hard drives are technologies that you largely plug in and forget about, unless you run applications that really thrash the drive (engineering, photography editing, video, etc.). The exception is when the drive fails, in which case life can get complicated. So I'd tend to stay away from the cheapest possible drive, and get one with good reviews and a history of reliable performance. Won't guarantee anything, but I'd rather pay a bit more if it buys me a longer mean-time-to-failure.
Second, for the quote above:
Firewire 800 is faster than Firewire 400 which is faster than USB2.0.
USB2.0 is rated at 480 Mbps, while Firewire 400 is rated at, well, 400 Mbps. However, the FW protocol has less overhead, so most of the time, it achieves more sustained performance than does USB2.0.
BUT. If you ever want to plug the drive into a different computer, especially a PC, you might want to go for a USB2.0 drive. Every PC has USB2.0; only rarely do they offer a FW port. So a USB drive will be more interchangeable, should the need arise.
USB1.0 or a wireless connection are both lousy in bandwidth and shouldn't even figure in your comparison, if you're going to want to back up lots of data.
So for your purposes, I'd look for a FW800 interface if I cared about performance; I'd look for a USB2.0 interface if I could sacrifice a bit more than 2x the performance in exchange for portability/interoperability. And once you do the initial synchronization/backup, each successive backup is not going to be all *that* much data, so the performance hit of going to USB2.0 is probably not huge.
Hope this helps.