USB or Firewire?

[joed]

I bought a Maxtor 300Gig external drive. I have a choice of hooking it
up via Firewire or USB.

What is the difference?

I'm using a 3gig Pent 4 Dell machine.

 

[Rod Speed]

I bought a Maxtor 300Gig external drive. I have
a choice of hooking it up via Firewire or USB.

What is the difference?

Firewire is a tad faster because there is less protocol overhead.

 

[Arno Wagner]

I bought a Maxtor 300Gig external drive. I have a choice of hooking it
up via Firewire or USB.

What is the difference?

I'm using a 3gig Pent 4 Dell machine.

In my erperience FireWire is more reliable, but that may be specific
to the equipment I tried (different from yours on both sides).

In principle you should be able to switch to the other option without
data loss (both use the SCSI disk command set on the higher layers
of their protocol stack) if you have problems with one option.
Maybe you should try that as long as you do not have much data on
it.

Arno

 

[joed]

In my erperience FireWire is more reliable, but that may be specific
to the equipment I tried (different from yours on both sides).

In principle you should be able to switch to the other option without
data loss (both use the SCSI disk command set on the higher layers
of their protocol stack) if you have problems with one option.
Maybe you should try that as long as you do not have much data on
it.

Arno

I've had enough problems with my recent old comp. That's why I got
this new one. I'll stick with USB.

Protocol stack? Is that a monthly or bi-monthly publication? : )

Thanks for answering.

 

[dg]

In my erperience FireWire is more reliable, but that may be specific
to the equipment I tried (different from yours on both sides).

I agree. I don't know why but I have never had a USB HD that was 100%
reliable, and I have used several different brands of interface (which may
all use the same chip, I have not looked that far into it) and on several
different PCs. Firewire HD interface seems to be perfect but I have not had
nearly as much experience with them.

--Dan