Maxtor provided us with two similar 5400 rpm external hard drives, the USB 2.0-based Personal Storage 3000LE and the FireWire-based External Storage 3000XT. With our 1.3-GHz Pentium 4 test system equipped with 1GB of PC800 RDRAM, we loaded up SuperSpeed Software's RamDisk XP Pro and created a 700MB virtual hard drive. The low latency of our RAM disk as well as its solid-state performance allowed us focus on the performance of each interface using the similar external drives.

. . .

While USB 2.0 may not be the ultimate hard drive interface, its ability to read at a rate of 6MB per second matches the maximum write speed of a 40x CD recorder. Focusing on the MP3 transfer rates (Test 2), FireWire offers a significant advantage over USB 2.0, besting it by nearly 48 percent in write speeds and over 70 percent in read speeds. (Yet another (indirect) reason Apple iPod owners are so happy.)

We will soon revisit this particular test with a 7200 rpm hard drive, but the results are likely to remain consistent. In addition, notebook-sized hard drives such as those used in the iPod can be powered by a 6-pin FireWire interface whereas USB 2.0 would require an additional power supply/connection.