For external hard drives in this question, I'm referring to traditional HDDs; the kind with spinning metal inside of them (no RAM or flash-based super-high-performance hardware):
Is there a significant speed difference between USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 for external HDDs? And, while we're here, eSATA and FireWire 800? Sure you can just google the bus speed numbers, but can traditional HDDs even keep up with any of them?
Best Answer
Traditional hard drives (7200 RPM) are much faster than the USB standard allows for. You can prove it by taking a decent hard drive and plugging it in natively, and testing it, and then testing it in a USB caddy.
Since eSATA and Firewire (400/800) are both significantly quicker than USB, I'd be willing to bet they are reasonably close in speed to what sort of speeds you'd see from a natively plugged in drive. eSATA especially - since isn't it meant to be an external version of a native sata controller?