IEEE1394 (aka Firewire) beats USB2 for mass storage

[rgbtxus]

I had a few drives in USB2 enclosures and was unhappy with the throughput. So, seeing claims in the forums (i guess that's fora) that IEEE1394 was superior despite its spec being 400 Mbps vs 480 Mbps for USB2, I bought an enclosure that did both and moved the drive. The drive is some modern 80GB Maxtor (ATA133 I believe). I forget the number exactly but I think it does about 39MB/sec connected to an IDE controller.

Here are the data in MB/sec from hdparm -Tt (average of 3 runs each):

Old USB 2 enclosure 810.00 13.39
New enclosure USB2 811.00 13.32
New enclosure FW 809.00 23.33 !!!! ~75% faster

SO -- forget the 480 v.s. 400 b.s. Given the drivers in 2.4.23_pre7-gss, IEEE1394 wins hands down. I didn't benchmark writes but other post suggest that FW beats USB2 there too.

[shm]

Yup, I've found that fw does indeed beat usb2 in speed. The MAXIMUM speed of usb2 is higher than fw, but the average speed of fw is much faster.
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