pci card :p

one of my previous computers (3 years ago) had no firewire, but it had 8 usb ports (4 at back, 4 on mobo)

you can also buy a PCI firewire card, but I think USB will come more handy.

USB througput is MAXIMAL 28 mb/sec. Average speeds are mostly measured ~20 megabyte/second.

A recent harddisk can easily deliver more then 40 mb/sec, average....

So it's not the hard disk that is the bottlenec, but the interface.


Firewire is interesting because it uses practicaly no CPU power, while USB does. But not every computer has fiwi and the enclosures are more expensive.
And with recent (+1 GHz) cpu's, you won't really notice the slight performance drop...Exept when you're benchmarking or so, but then again..

most firewire enclosures have USB also...

most

don't go for 10.000rpm external storage

7200rpm is enough.. in my humble opinion

Angelus is has been sniffing from his black markers; the hard drive can deliver 80-133Mb/s and more.. USB and Firewire don't come close

Actually it is glue that I have been sniffing.
Those post-it thingies smell good from time to time. ;)
I never said that 10.000rpm should be taken, me not hardware fanatic.
Me telling what someone else told me. :)
I have been told that with an ext. hd the hd itself would be the bottlenect and not the usb connection. So I figured that most hd's are 7.200rpm and if that was the bottleneck then it should be better with a 10.000rpm drive... guess I was wrong.

it's the othe way around indeed; USB2.0 is the bottle neck