[G4] Can eMac hard-drives be upgraded?

[Alex]

On Apr 21, 2005, at 6:17 PM, John Baltutis wrote:

> On 04/21/05, John Erdman <jperdman at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>> I see that some boxes have USB, some FW and still others have both.
>> Isn't FW 400 still faster than USB 2.0. Why would I ever need an
>> external drive with both types of connection rather than just FW?
>
> Because most enclosure manufacturers package both to cut down costs. 
> By all
> means, just use the FW connection.

FW 400 is not necessarily "faster" than USB2. The performance of both 
buses are close, and in practice which one is faster may vary from 
drive to drive, due to differences in chipset and firmware -- e.g., see

<http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1375601,00.asp>

However, FW is definitely better than USB2 for this type of 
application, because USB is a host-based bus. Basically, although the 
performance is similar, the computer has to work harder to transfer 
large volumes of data over USB than over FW.

Should you want a dual-interface drive? It depends. If the drive is 
only going to be used on a Mac, then you can save some USD20-40 and get 
a FW-only drive. But if the drive is going to be used in a mixed 
Mac-Win environment, then you definitely want FW+USB, because, while 
USB2 is standard on a PC these days, most do not have FW (aka 
IEEE1394).

<0x0192>