External HDD for Mini USB 2.0 or FW800 Will it matter

[Wicked1]

I have an Mini which is our Server for all iTunes music, movies etc. I have two new drives USB (cheap seagate) and FW800 (cost a little more seagate)

Does it matter which one I run iTunes from, I do not see too much of a difference when running from USB as opposed to FW, but need to know before I move my 1.5TB of data to either of these 2 TB drives and which one will work best if it matters at all..

 

[The-Pro]

Moving the data to the Drive will be much quicker with the FW 800.
But once its over you wont see a difference. USB will be fast enough for streaming your content.

 

[Gav2k]

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In theory fw utilises the CPU less than USB does.

 

[mentaluproar]

For a server, FireWire is noticeably faster. For just holding media to playback later or time machine backups, USB is just fine.

 

[Idgit]

In theory fw utilises the CPU less than USB does.

Correct in practice, too. Especially on older hardware. When accessing an external USB hard drive, I've seen CPU usage vary from 5% to 30%. With Firewire, there is no CPU increase.

However, a USB drive will be fine for watching videos on a decently powered machine.

 

[Wicked1]

Decided to go with the USB since it is a cheaper drive and use the FW800 as a Backup since I run CCC from the internal to that drive every other week.

I switched to FW800 a while ago and forgot how slow USB is when copying around 1 TB of data, ugh