External HDD USB-Firewire

[kprt]

I am looking at hard drive enclosures and have a question about Firewire 400. I know that 1394a should be faster than USB 2.0, but is it enough to where you would really see much quicker backups/hard drive imaging than with USB?

 

[14049752]

You won't see much difference between the two for backups or imaging. Firewire is slightly faster for sustained writes (large files) but not fast enough where it'll really make that much difference.
To give you an idea: I ran this highly scientific test before this post. I have a usb/fw enclosure with a 2.62gb image file on it. I copied the file to my system 3 times, using both interfaces, then copied it back three times using both interfaces. I took the average time to copy the file from each set of three.
USB's read (from the ext. drive) time was 2:28, write (to the ext. drive) was 2:32. Firewire's read time was 1:18, write was 2:35. So, firewire was faster reading from the drive but nearly the same when writing.
Something else to consider, when you're imaging a system, the hard drive typically isn't going to be the bottleneck unless you do a 1:1 uncompressed image of the drive. The cpu will hold you up as it's decompressing or compressing your image, neither usb or firewire will make a huge difference in the time.

 

[tkrabec]

I've noticed a significant difference between firewire and USB. Firewire puts a lowe load on the computer since it does more processing in the chipset than USB. Firewire is much faster over usb for large amounts of small files.