Mike wrote:

While looking for an external HDD to hold me over 'til I build a PC in six
months or so I've been exploring external HDD interfaces. Currently, I have
a 4 year old Dell Dimension w/ XP Pro. I'm going to buy a USB2 Firewire
1394b internal card for it .I'd like to find out if 1394b is worth the
additional expense. I believe 1394b is capable of 800Mbs while 1394a is
capable of 400Mbs. A SATA II HDD (300MBs) in an external case w/ a 1394b
interface will a PC be able to make use of this high speed data transfer or
will the high data speed be wasted because the PC and XP Pro don't know how
to handle these speeds? What is the most cost effective combination for an
external HDD?

Thanks,

Mike

You won't notice any real difference between 1394a and 1394b.

Firewire is marginally quicker than USB2.

On the PC, I typically get a transfer rate of anything from 15MB/sec to
25MB/sec using either firewire or USB.
I don't get an awful lot more on my internal, single SATA drives -
although the mass storage drives in RAID 0 give about a 20% boost in one
or two machines, and 30% in others.

On the Mac, I get an absolute minimim of 42MB/sec firewire, and a tiny
bit less (maybe 40MB/sec) with USB.
With a single SATA drive (I don't have RAID in my Macs) I get well over
45MB/sec.

In all cases, there is practically no difference whether I am using SATA
or PATA drives.

In my main recovery machine, which has a PCI-express SATA2 controller,
running anything from 4 to 8 drives in RAID 0, there is no appreciable
difference whether the drives I'm using are SATA150 or SATA300.

In the UK, eSATA devices are right down in price; about £45 for the
housing, cable and adaptor, plus the cost of the drive. (This is a
fairly simple setup, taking one of the SATA channels to a blanking plate
/ adaptor, then running another SATA cable from that to the housing.)


Odie
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Retrodata
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