On Jan 3, 2012, at 2:29 PM, Valter Prahlad wrote:
I respectfully disagree.
I tried several external USB2 HDs, and the trasnfer speed always
seemed
relatively slow (like 10MB/s at best).
Sounds like you're connecting to a USB 1.1 port rather than a USB 2.0
port? You can check the port type in System Profiler, it will say
"high speed" if it's USB 2.0, and it will NOT say "high speed" if
it's USB 1.1.
That being said, USB 2.0 can be flakey sometimes, BUT, this is almost
always because a certain USB 2.0 chipset has problems with OS X. We
were talking about a real Mac, with Apple supplied USB 2.0, so in this
case, USB 2.0 should be solid, and fast. If you're using a 3rd-party
USB 2.0 card, especially one that requires its own drivers, it could
be slower, or screwed up in OS X, but generally Apple supplied
hardware works at full speed, and should be nearly identical in speed
to Firewire with a single 2.5" external HD. If you had an external SSD
that would be different, USB 2.0 would be slower than FW800.
OTOH, I just got a G-Drive (Hitachi) with FW800/USB2, and FW800 is
really
faster than USB2 (on the same drive), at least twice the speed.
Even when connected to a FW400 port, it's still way faster than USB2.
FW400 & FW800 should be virtually identical with the same single HD.
You need at least 2 HDs in a RAID configuration, or an SSD to get
greater speed.
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