Quote: Originally Posted by sssssss27
FireWire 800 is the latest FireWire standard I have heard about and it has a throughput of 800 Mbps as opposed to USB 2.0's 480 Mbps. If I remember correct the highest throughput of IDE is 133 Mbps so both USB and FireWire will easily work as an IDE converter. Although FireWire is less software dependent and more hardware dependent so you are usually much closer to it's max speed than with USB 2.0.
About USB bandwidth being a concern, it all depends on your motherboard or USB card. Some times all the USB ports on the motherboard are their own port but usually they have two USB ports that get split amongst the rest.
There's ATA133 which is 133 Megabytes per second. Beware the MB (megabytes) and Mb (megabits) difference being 8 bits to the byte. So basically Firewire 800 is 100 Megabytes per second and USB 2.0 at 480 Mb/s is 60 MB/s and Firewire at 400Mb/s is 50MB/s also there's USB 1.0 (1.1?) at 12Mb/s which is 1.5MB/s . A bunch of numbers.. anyway it is generally true that Firewire isn't as CPU intensive as USB 2 is. And also about ports and channels are true as well, meaning that although our computer may have 4 USB 2.0 ports they may all be on the same channel meaning that the 480Mb/s is shared between the 4 ports. However this doesn't mean that each port only has 120Mb/s .
Also an external USB 2.0 or Firewire CD/DVD drive you'd buy would simply have an IDE to firewire or IDE to USB bridge in it. There really aren't any "native" USB or Firewire drives.
I hope this helped clear things up. Any corrections are welcome. :-)