Hey folks...hoping to have myc omptuer by the end of this week. Going to back most of or pretty well evertyhing to whatever room is left on the 2x200gb sata drives i have.

This all being said, i'm gonna need an external harddrive enclosure. Does anyone have any suggestions? Any reason to go firewire over usb?

 

If your computer has a firewire port, by all means get a firewire enclosure. USB is slow as .

 

is the harddrive going to be able to keep up? Computer will have firewire.

Can a harddrive process stuff as fast as firewire can/could?

 

USB 2.0 is fast enough at 480MB per second. Most ATA drives do about 130 MB per second, with SATA drives being faster(not sure how fast though).

A-computers.ca or memoryexpress.com are where I buy all my computer stuff.

 

as stated fierwire is faster than usb 2.0, but if you have to take the drive to someone elses house, or plug it into a pc that doesn't have firewire, you're SOL... finding a pc with at least usb 1.1 is a lot easier, then finding one with firewire. USB 2.0 is much more practical.

Mark

 

Considering USB 2.0 can transfer data faster than your HD can accept it, I would hardly call it "slow as ".

 

ya but USB is not hardware ran so it takes tons of CPU to run USB to its full tilt.Plus the way it sends and recives is way diff. it needs to wait for quarry unlike firewire.

 

Finally, someone who knows what they are talking about

 

hmmm so i read, technically USB 2.0 is faster, but firewire was marginally quicker with transfers and did use a bit less cpu usage. (Good call on that one).


That being said, ended up ordering some stuff for a friend, and realized i could get one enclosure usb only for like $35 whereas the firewire/usb enclosure i was lookin at was $60. So firewire it was.


*********NEW QUESTION**********

Taking harddrives outta the old system, I realized i had 1 sata and 1 ide (not 2 sata - woops). So i'll throw the IDE into the old 350mhz pc that's laying around and share it over the network. **Question is...will accessing that drive over the network be slow because the computer is slow and old? Or will it be decently fast?

 

Not really... the clock cycles it takes to run USB is negligible...

The compatability alone makes USB the better choice.