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External Harddrives File Transfer Speeds Compared: USB 2 vs. Firewire 400
After reviewing the Acomdata Samba USB Enclosure, which houses a Seagate SATA 3.5" 7200 RPM drive with 8MByte buffer, and also the LaCie 160 GB Portable Firewire-400 2.5" 5400 RPM drive a couple weeks ago, I finally took the time to run some simple file transfer speed tests on both drives.

External Harddrives : File Copy Speeds Compared
USB 2: SATA 3.5" 7200 RPM vs. FireWire-400: 2.5" 5400 RPM

Single file [200 MB]

Source \ Target Internal Drive External USB Drive External FW400 Drive
Internal Drive - 11.104s 7.167s
External USB Drive 5.533s - -
External FW400 Drive 5.187s - -

3750 files [combined 22.2 MB]

Source \ Target Internal Drive External USB Drive External FW400 Drive
Internal Drive - 1.951s 0.895s
External USB Drive 1.077s - -
External FW400 Drive 0.968s - -
  • Internal Drive: Hitachi Travelstar HTS541612J9SA00
  • External USB: Acomdata Samba USB Enclosure / Seagate ST3250823AS SATA
  • External Firewire 400: LaCie 160 GB USB 2.0 /Firewire400 Portable Hard Drive

Results

Setting the observed time to copy files to and from the USB drive to 100%, means that reading from the Firewire drive is about 6% faster for a single larger file and 10% faster for a couple thousand smaller files.
The results for writing files show a more significant difference. Writing to the Firewire drive is 35% faster for a larger file and about 54% faster for a couple thousand small files.

Btw, the abovementioned reviews on the drives can be found here:

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Published on: Sunday, January 06th, 2008  •  Category: [hardware]
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