> I notice there's a spare firewire port on the external drive. > What do people usually end up using that for?
Firewire devices can be daisy-chained. That is, one device plugged into another into another. This is as opposed to the hub and spoke topology used by USB. Desktop Macs have two Firewire ports as much for this reason as any other. One can actually network Macs using Firewire. Who remembers phone net cables and early AppleTalk? > I understand firewire is better for drives than usb, > but that's another debate I guess. Firewire is better than USB for anything that benefits from a sustained data transfer rate. Or anything with a modest power requirement (like an external hard drive) so that an external power supply is not required. This is why the iSight cameras are so much better quality than Windows USB web cams. The only significant advantage of USB is that it is less expensive. (This, of course, leads to it being more widely used. The popularity of USB is based only on the cost factor, not any technical superiority. But popularity is an important factor.)
