This weekend I decided to practice what I preach by buying another hard drive for my Power Mac G5 at home. It had a single 160 GB internal hard drive but no backup drive which I tell people never to do, but I was doing it myself. Trusting a single drive with all of my documents, photos and music despite the fact that it is not a matter of if your hard drive will fail but when.

G5 Power Mac The ideal setup would be a second internal hard drive that I could configure as a mirror to the first drive and then an external terabyte firewire drive that I could use for Time Machine backups and additional storage. However, I do not have the budget for a ideal setup. Instead I had about hundred dollars I wanted to spend. CompUSA had some weekend only deals on some Western Digital And Seagate USB 2.0 500 GB external hard drives for only $119 each. However, I would have preferred Firewire connections because they offer better performance. You may be asking how is that possible when USB 2.0 is rated at 480 Mbps and standard Firewire 400 is 400 Mbps? The answer is that differences in the architecture of the two interfaces have a huge impact on the sustained throughput.

  • FireWire, uses a "Peer-to-Peer" architecture in which the peripherals are intelligent and can negotiate bus conflicts to determine which device can best control a data transfer 

  • Hi-Speed USB 2.0 uses a "Master-Slave" architecture in which the computer handles all arbitration functions and dictates data flow to, from and between the attached peripherals (adding additional system overhead and resulting in slower data flow control)

 Read and write tests to the same IDE hard drive connected using FireWire and then Hi-Speed USB 2.0 show:
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