Most modern Macs—except for the MacBook Air and some MacBook models—offer both FireWire and USB connections. When shopping for an external hard drive, then, you have many options for something that will work with your Mac. Today, USB hard drives are more common and less expensive than FireWire or even FireWire/USB combo drives. But ubiquity doesn’t necessarily equate to superiority. All other areas of comparison aside, what many people want to know is how the two technologies match up in terms of speed. USB 2.0 has a maximum theoretical bandwidth of 480 Mbps, versus 400 Mbps for FireWire 400 and 800 Mbps for FireWire 800. To get a sense of real-world performance, however, we ran drive tests on both a 2.4GHz 17-inch MacBook Pro with a 160GB, 5400RPM internal hard drive and a Mac Pro 3GHz 8-core system with a 250GB, 7200RPM internal drive (each with OS X 10.6.2 and 2GB of RAM installed). Western Digital My Book Studio When we connected the MacBook Pro to a 2TB Western Digital My Book Studio drive and copied a 1GB file to it from the internal hard drive, we found that it took 23 percent less time over FireWire 400 than over USB 2.0. Duplicating that file using FireWire 400 on the WD drive took 10 percent less time than when run over USB 2.0. Garage band 10 for mac track volume control. To see how the different connections performed in more typical backup tasks, we copied over a 2.5GB folder containing 5000 individual files and folders. External drive enclosures have two types of interfaces: internal and external. The internal interface connects the drive to the enclosure and is usually a SATA 2 (3 Gbps) or SATA 3 (6 Gbps). The external interface connects the enclosure to the Mac. In that test, we found the FireWire 400 transfer to be 26 percent faster than USB 2.0. Using AJA’s System Test application, we found the MacBook Pro’s FireWire 400 connection to be 46 percent faster than USB in the writing tests. In the reading tests, however, the edge went to USB, which was nine percent faster than FireWire 400. Using the same hard drive, but connected to our Mac Pro, we found the FireWire 400 connection to be 19 percent faster than the USB on the copy to the external drive, 21 percent faster on both the duplication test and the copy 5000 files test, and exactly the same in terms of performance difference on the AJA read and write tests as with the MacBook Pro. Comparing the FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 results on the MacBook Pro with the My Book Studio showed the FireWire 800 connection to be 35 percent faster at copying the file to the external drive, 51 percent faster duplicating that file on the external drive, and 37 percent faster copying over the 5000 files and folders. The AJA write test showed the FireWire 800 connection’s throughput at almost three times faster than the USB connected WD, with 58 percent faster read scores. The My Book tested on the Mac Pro showed the FireWire 800 connection to be 48 percent faster than USB at copying the file to the external drive, 54 percent faster duplicating the file, and 49 percent faster copying over our 5000 files and folders. The AJA write tests showed the 800 connection writing twice as many megabytes per second as the USB connection, and 49 percent faster reading. Verbatim portable We also tested a zippy little Verbatim portable drive, which was 23 percent faster than USB in the copy to external test on the MacBook Pro, 21 percent faster at the duplication test, 14 percent faster on the 5000 file copy test, 42 percent faster on the AJA write throughput, and 8 percent faster on the AJA read throughput. Connected via FireWire 800, we saw FireWire speeds 42 percent faster than USB at our copy to external test, 55 percent faster on our duplication test, 32 percent faster in the 5000 files test, and two times faster in the AJA read and write scores.
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