Pa3553 Firewire port speed

[hfivefour]

My son has a Pa3553. Apart from quality one of the criteria was firewire for loading videos.

He is now thinking about getting an external drive.

As I understand (maybe wrongly) a firewire 400 (1394a) is not much different in speed to USB2.0.

However firewire 800 or 1394b is.

We cannot work out what version is 1394a or 1394b is on the pa3553.

Does anyone know or provide pointers in the system.

TIA

[otheos]

The Pa3553 has an 1394a port, not b, i.e. 400Mbit/sec.

However this is considerably faster than USB2.0 which although advertises a similar speed, it is severely capped by overhead, which limits the transfer speed to only 25MB/s. On top of that seek speed of hard drives connected through USB is also severely affected.

Firewire on the other hand is much faster, all the advertised bandwidth is available (almost 50MB/s) and seek times are as fast as if connected using SATA/PATA.

So Firewire is always better than USB, if you can find a drive with a 1394 port, go for it instead of a USB2.0 drive.

However E-Sata is even better and the Pa-3553 has one of those too. Just make sure you buy a device that supports "power by E-Sata" which means it uses the E-Sata connection for data and the surrounding USB port for power. This can be tricky. (E-Sata doesn't provide power and an external power supply is required otherwise).