USB vs. FireWire for external hard drives

"Traditional hard drives (7200 RPM) are much faster than the USB standard allows for. You can prove it by taking a decent hard drive and plugging it in natively, and testing it, and then testing it in a USB caddy.

Since eSATA and Firewire (400/800) are both significantly quicker than USB, I'd be willing to bet they are reasonably close in speed to what sort of speeds you'd see from a natively plugged in drive. eSATA especially - since isn't it meant to be an external version of a native sata controller?"

"I'm chiming in a bit late, but... the bus speeds that the various protocols are rated at are no good indication of the real speed you might expect. For example, USB has a lot of overhead (by design), and with most control chips I've come across USB 2.0 is actually no faster than Firewire 400 (no numbers at hand, hope you'll take it as anecdotal evidence from me...).

A couple of years ago, USB 2.0 was in fact the slower of those two, due to the fact that it requires more CPU backing, but now that we have dual-core CPUs and fast internal buses everywhere, you won't find any difference anymore.

For a quick overview of realistic throughput you might expect, see the site of the S-ATA SIG. That's of course hardly independent data given that they defined the e-SATA standard, but I'd say they're actually quite optimistic about USB 2.0: their quoted 45MB/s is something I've never, ever seen in my own use - 32MB/s tops, really."

From a users perspective I have found USB2 better than firewire as there are more devices available. For raw speed firewire 800 is excellent. I haven't used eSATA though, and I feel it will probably end up being THE standard.

One of the big advances of FW is that it is a peer-to-peer protocol. Which means you can make a daisychain with 4 computers and 5 hard drives, and still get it to work. You can have problems when 2 systems write the same file at the same time, but FW is much more flexible.