External usb or firewaire for hard drives?

[kenmo]

I have two external hard drives. The cases they are in supports both firewire and usb. I also have a pci firewire card.

According to posts here at videohelp.com there is a Windows problem with firewire and Windows doesn't always recognize (or assign a drive letter) to external firewire storage devices.

I was wonder is this firewire problem also an issue in Mepis? Would I bebetter of installing the two hard drives as us or firewire?

Thanks kindly....
Thanks Edit/Delete Message

[edDV]

Try using Firewire first and see if it works for your system. It does with mine.

Test a large file transfer and measure the transfer time from the internal drive to external1 and from external1 to external2.

Then hook it up USB2 and test again with the same file renamed. Use the connection that transfers fastest.

[GMaq]

Kenmo,

Given the choice I would go with USB it is the de facto standard and will continue to get better and better support in Linux and firewire (for disc storage) will probably take a backseat. I have 2 USB 2.0 NTFS External drives and they have worked fabulously with MEPIS/AntiX, even with the NTFS file system.

If you are determined to use firewire than I would guess you may have to add yourself as a user to the "disk" group. I know i have had to do that in the past to get Linux to recognize my Firewire Video Converter (ADVC-100)

[ronkkrop]

My suggestion would be firewire, it has a much higher bandwidth than usb2.

Wikipedia:
USB: 12 or 480Mbit/s
Firewire: 400Mbit/s or 800Mbit/s

Also for those who care, firewire came before USB and it was built as a solid fast protocol. USB was adopted as a cheap alternative to firewire, but was much slower. Nowadays USB is everywhere and simply for that reason firewire gets a bad rap, even though it's a better protocol. If apple had played their cards right firewire would be the current standard. (How many times does that get said about apple anyways?)

[piano632]

Never had a problem with firewire on WinXP, though I am not using a PCI card as I have firewire built into my motherboard. Well, come to think of it, I did use firewire on a PCI card for DV video and it worked fine. Firewire 400 is slightly faster (5-10%) at sustained speeds over USB 2.0 though both will work of course. eSATA is even faster. But avoid those Seagate FreeAgent externals as I've heard they get burning hot and eSATA on those things is buggy.

[edDV]

My suggestion would be firewire, it has a much higher bandwidth than usb2.

Wikipedia:
USB: 12 or 480Mbit/s
Firewire: 400Mbit/s or 800Mbit/s

Also for those who care, firewire came before USB and it was built as a solid fast protocol. USB was adopted as a cheap alternative to firewire, but was much slower. Nowadays USB is everywhere and simply for that reason firewire gets a bad rap, even though it's a better protocol. If apple had played their cards right firewire would be the current standard. (How many times does that get said about apple anyways?)

The 400Mb/s vs 480Mb/s specs are somewhat misleading. These are measured for burst performance for small files or from disk cache. Sustained rates for large files are much lower (often far less than half) burst performance. Sustained performance of the mechanical hard drive is a limiting factor but current drives are capable of 480 to even 960 Mb/s (60-120MB/s) sustained rates. Hardware based eSATA can maintain those sustained rates when operating in isolation from CPU activity in bus mastering mode.

USB2 in particular is limited by its software disk controller which is subject to interrupts from other OS tasks on the CPU. Realistic maximum sustained transfer for USB2 is around 240Mb/s (30MB/s). Firewire drives are less constrained by CPU activity and usually run about 10-15% faster than USB2 drives from a dedicated IEEE-1394 interface. Other IEEE-1394 traffic will slow a Firewire disk.