laptops + external hdd

[drum_]

Ive been looking in to external hdd and it seems to be a popular opinion that its never a good idea to use usb when on a laptop and to use firewire instead when on a laptop. this is news to me, hopefully some can explain why this is.
also i have no fire just usb 2.0
iv always thought they were on par but they seem to believe this really strongly

 

[drum_]

also add in what i was reading they also started talking about min 7500rpm been all that matters.

 

[FunkDaddy]

also i have no fire just usb 2.0

Then what does it matter?

Firewire is faster than USB as far as I know. I use USB hard drives and sticks with my laptop, no performance issues at all.

 

[Bobbsy]

Trouble is, there are several "flavours" of both Firewire and USB so you have to be careful what you're comparing.

Firewire 400 (IEEE 1394a) has a theoretical throughput of 400mbps; Firewire 800 (IEEE 1394b) has a theoretical throughput of 800mbps. Because Firewire is a peer to peer architecture, it's generally good about achieving its theoretical maximum on sustained throughput.

USB2 "High Speed" has a theoretical maximum of 480kbps but, because it uses a master/slave architecture, has trouble sustaining this speed on sustained throughput.

The other thing about USB is that it's a shared bus so if, for example, you have both a USB sound card and a USB HDD, these have to share the 480mbps maximum. Add a USB mouse and that's sharing too--and so on.

However, theoretical maxima are just that--really it's a case of "suck it and see". In my home studio I have a Firewire audio interface and a USB2 HDD and they seem to play nicely together for the sort of things I do. That's all that really matters!

Bob