[X4U] Firewire or USB 2

[Peter Krug]

On Mar 4, 2005, at 11:34 AM, Allan Rube¹ wrote:

> My old firewire drive is dead. I have a G4 dual with usb 1 and 
> Firewire 400.
>
> I could get a firewire drive for $200 or for the same price buy a usb 2
> drive (same size) and a 4 usb 2 card to install in my Mac.
>
> Is there any disadvantage of going the usb 2 route? It seems that way I
> could use the drive when I go visit my son who has a pc.
>
> Is it a simple plug and play (no software) for the usb card (I was 
> looking
> at a store brand card at CompUSA.
>

Allan,

If you are going to use the drive on your son's PC and your mac, it 
either needs to be formatted as FAT32 (for windows) or you will have to 
install a program on the PC to allow it to see the Mac-formatted drive.

For sustained transfers, USB2 is slower than FW400.  If you are just 
using it for backups or small file transfers, it's probably not a big 
deal which way you go.  If you are going to use the drive as a DV 
scratch disk, you need to stick with Firewire.

You could always install a FW card in your son's PC, also.

Peter

A little computer haiku:
I can't remember
the last time I restarted
I love OS X

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