"Wayne Youngman" wrote in message ...

"Rod Speed" wrote
snip
Yes, but its basically just the rpm that matters.
And a housing that supports the fastest firewire
in spades. It may be worth adding the fastest
firewire to the PCs for the better speed.

And cooling can be a problem with 7200 rpm drives in external
housings that dont deliberately attempt to cool the drive somehow,
either with a fan or excellent conduction to a metal case etc.


Hi,
thanks Rod for your reply. I don't really have the option to install
*FireWire* adapters into every machine, but I do have FireWire in my own
machine so I will take another look for a good value *combo*
(USB2.0/FireWire) enclosure.

So the 7,200rpm will help transfer speeds?

Really depends on what you do to move the files
to and from the external drive and whether you
will ever do that using the new faster firewire 800

that's interesting as I wasn't sure if the USBv2.0 specs could utilize this. . . .

Generally they cant. I was more referring there to the
firewire alt and should have said that more carefully.