Is USB 2.0 good enough?

I have worked both with PC laptops using AvidXpressProHD, and now more recently with an Apple G4 laptop using FCP 5.1. Here is my experience. I was able to connect to an external Lacie 250 GB drive via the Firewire 400 port on my PC laptop and copy .mxf files over to it (in the Avid Media Files/MXF/1 directory that I had to CREATE in order to make Avid read them -- so stupid, btw), and I was able to play back footage and edit JUST FINE. I cannot speak for USB 2.0, however... just to be safe, I purchased a LACIE Firewire 800 PCMCIA card for the PC, but never got to use it (unfortunately), as I switched over to the Apple before the card actually arrived... but, as a practical matter, I didn't have any problems with the Firewire 400.

Same thing with the Apple G4 laptop. I initially had to connect to my Lacie external drive via Firewire 400, because I didn't have a 6pin to 9pin cable. There was no problem re: copying the files and editing the footage from the external and seeing no-drop outs during the whole process using Firewire 400. I have since gotten the 9pin to 6pin cable and I can't really tell ostensibly that there's any difference (which is a good thing -- no crashes, no drop outs, no problems).

I stuck with Lacie all the way, re: compatibility. I got the LACIE external harddrive and made sure (although didn't use it) that I got the LACIE Firewire 800 PCMCIA card. I will tell you that I had previously purchased a "reputable" third party Firewire 800 card (forget the brand right now) and it DID NOT interface at all with the Lacie external harddrive. I was so pissed. So, as far as my limited experience is concerned, I would stick with Lacie all the way....

Hope that helps (?).

--Justin.
 
The newer LACIEdrives come with both firewire 400 and 800 ports. Just get one of those and then you're future proof. The lacie drives are the absolute best and very reliable. If you're having performance issues with fw400 then you can move up to 800.

Note the transfer speed of the bus (firewire) has very little to do with the performance. -This is more depenedent on the speed of the drive in RPM, BUFFER size etc. FW400 should be fine for your needs.

Can't go wrong with a LACIE! - I have two of them :) - Works great.
 
Just some more information, if anyone is hoping to get FW800 speed on a Windows PC you need to get a FW800 card with a Texas Instruments chip (the Lacie card uses that) on it and the Unibrain driver (The makers of Firewire) as windows XP sp2 driver does not support FW800 speeds, right now I have a Lacie big disk exreme and I get about 70 mb/s read-write.
 
My experience has been that throughputs for USB2 are disappointing in real world tests.

I really prefer firewire, and cards cost under $50.00
 
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