[X4U] Firewire or USB 2

[Nick Scalise]

On Friday, March 04, 2005, at 10:34AM, Allan Rube¹  <allan at nhbungalow.com> 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.

I would recommend Firewire. I just got the ADStech USB2.0 case with a Hitachi 160GB IDE at CompUSA with their special - $60 for the whole thing (after rebates).

While it was an excellent price, when I plugged it in to my Dual2.0 G5, it showed up as USB 1. Only until I moved it to the front port did the G5 recognized it as USB2.0. After that, when testing the drive with the tools that came with the case, the Hitachi 160GB could only manage 18MB per second, compared to my older 80GB Firewire drive which reached 34MB per second.

So now the 160 is purely for offline storage of video projects, no heavy lifting for it. Though I may swap cases with the firewire drive...

Regarding the USB ports on the G5, are there three actual busses on the G5? Or is it that the two ports in the back are limited by what is plugged into the other port? I mean if you plug USB1 devices into one back port, will the other port slow down to USB1 also?

--
Nick Scalise
nickscalise at mac.com