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This is easy to understand. Most laptops have USB as standard and very few have Firewire. Even if they do have Firewire they will almost certainly also have USB too. So choosing USB makes more sense. You will find it more universally useable for many years to come. But Firewire needs a mention because it is becoming more prevalent. The speed gain that Firewire offers is to be ignored for our purposes so don't get carried away by those figures that you will see.
Backing up takes time, hours, not because the transfer rate is slow because you chose the wrong option out of USB vs Firewire, but because the operating system and the two drives take some time to do their part of the job. In any case a good backup program will not hog the system resources but try to work in the background so that it does it's job without slowing down the rest of the computer. That is a major design feature that I built into Bax It! for example but you may or may not find the same in similar programs.
Regardless of whether you choose USB or Firewire that is external and hardly more than a cosmetic issue for our purposes except that USB will be more trans-portable for a good few years yet.
Internally it will be IDE or SATA but externally it will be Firewire or USB.
Once you have a housed drive, a drive in it's enclosure box in other words, it will be USB or Firewire but when you open a housing (or your laptop's drive cover) you can see whether it is IDE or SATA.
By Paul E. Coughlin
SaneThinking.com
8 June 2008
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