External HD for iMac....USB2.0 or Firewire?

Marcel

Marcel

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Marcel
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I'm taking some HD's out of my Windows machine, for use on the iMac, so want to put them in an external HD caddy.

Now, I would assume that Firewire would be the best choice, but can I find an external caddy that takes a Sata 3.5" drive, and connects via firewire??...nope!

I'm just worried that USB2.0 isn't going to be fast enough to support an external HD. Maybe video files etc. I like to watch AVI's / films etc on my machine, so it needs to be fast enough.

I will also need to copy off DV footage from my DVCam via Firewire, so it's going to need to keep up with that too (Not sure what the xfer speed is).

Anyone with real world experience of using an External HD ia USB2.0 on a Mac care to comment?

Thanks
 
Not quite what you were after, but the nearest I got to this was loading RAW images into iPhoto; USB2 was sloooooooooooooow ... Firewire 800 using a reader was noticably quicker, so running an external drive via USB2 will be pretty slow.

You might be better off investing in an external Firewire drive and copying the stuff to that rather than going through the rigmarole of removing the drives from the Windoze machine ... if you intend to copy stuff from a DV cam as well a Firewire hub would help.
 
Well in the end I popped out and got a USB2 Caddy for 2 drives to go in. This is going to be fine for the most part.

My photography is on the internal drive, and if I have problems capturing DV footage, I can always do it to the mac internal drive, and then move it over afterwards.
 
i keep all my photos on the macs internal drive, and run 2 x USB 2.0 external drives, one for time machine and the other for video editing. I have no problem connecting my camcorder to firewire and capturing onto the external usb 2.0 drive, so i would say its not a problem.

If you insist on Firewire then i think you will have to buy an external harddrive with firewire connector, as ive never come across an empty caddy with it on.
 
I did find one, which suited me, but it was a retailer found in the middle of a google search, and I didn't really want to order from an unknown company.

Nevermind, I think USB2 should be fine :)

Not to get these hard drives cleaned and out of my windows machine.

Next step...thinking about the file system!
 
what caddy did you get marcel, i might be looking for one, ian gave me a link to something really expensive..
 
from Aria.

By file system, I mean in Windows we had a choice of NTFS or Fat32.

Now we've got FAT32 or HFC? I think.
 
mac can read and write to FAT32, it can read NTFS but now write to it.

I use FAT32 on drives i need a PC to have access to, and mac format for all the others
 
If I remember correctly, there's little difference in the transfer speeds of USB 2.0 and Firewire. USB 2.0 is slightly faster I think.
 
hepburn said:
If I remember correctly, there's little difference in the transfer speeds of USB 2.0 and Firewire. USB 2.0 is slightly faster I think.
Click to expand...

Other way round. USB has a max read/write rate of up to 480MB/s whereas firewire has a minimum of 400MB/s

Here's a good example of a comparison: http://www.usb-ware.com/firewire-vs-usb.htm

Firewire 800 is much quicker than USB 2.0 but USB 3.0 will be as quick or quicker than FW800 but as yet it's vapourware.
 
Tyrone Shoelaces said:
Other way round. USB has a max read/write rate of up to 480MB/s whereas firewire has a minimum of 400MB/s

Here's a good example of a comparison: http://www.usb-ware.com/firewire-vs-usb.htm

Firewire 800 is much quicker than USB 2.0 but USB 3.0 will be as quick or quicker than FW800 but as yet it's vapourware.
Click to expand...


Not quite correct. USB2 has a maximum speed of 480mbit/sec, and FW400 has a maximum speed of 400mbit/sec.

However, the differences in the way they handle that data, is that USB2 is better for burst speeds, while FW is better for sustaining a higher data rate over time.

So for bigger files and continuous data transfer, FW would be better.
For lots of files and burst transferring, USB2 would be better.

There's also the question of being able to daisychain firewire, and also the CPU overheads associated with USB2, but that's only minimal IMO in the grand scale of things, and I'm not that fussed about that :D
 
Marcel

As for the disc system, if your using NTFS on your HDD from your windoze machine take a look at this bit of software, which enables you to read and write to NTFS of any standard.

I have been using it for a long time as a lot of my clients give me data on NTFS formated volumes. It has never let me down.

NTFS for Mac. http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

Mark
 
Oooh thanks for that Mark. At the moment, the discs I'm taking out of my windows are machine *are* NTFS (I had planned on emptying / converting them)

I'll take a look :)
 
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