A couple things:
1) Firewire is a peripheral connection much like USB. However, there are two types of USB out there: USB 1.1 and USB 2.0.
[ul][li]1.1 runs at about 12mbps or 1.5MB/s[/li]
[li]2.0 can get up to 480mbps or 60MB/s[/li]
[li]Firewire peaks at 400mbps or 50MB/s[/li][/ul]
2) Current IDE hard drives average around 20-40 MB/s transfer times. ATA/100 and ATA/133 connections allow for up to 100MB/s or 133MB/s peak transfer rates, which are both higher than USB and Firewire. But since most drives rarely peak this high, it shouldn't matter if you go with Firewire or IDE hard drives. Just know that the IDE standard is still a bit faster. ~cdogg
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- A. Einstein