How much speed, effectively, does one lose by going USB 2.0 over Firewire?

Dunno, in theory you shouldn't lose any, in practice I'm pretty sure USB is slower but I don't know by how much. I have only internal drives so I have no practical experience.

IME, the difference is only noticeable if you need realtime access to very very big files (like for video editing).

With USB it really depends on the machine and on how much activity is going on. Firewire has a dedicated controller to deal with the overhead, USB uses computer resources to deal with the overhead. If you are on a heavily taxed machine then USB really takes a performance hit.

Firewire has a dedicated controller to deal with the overhead, USB uses computer resources to deal with the overhead.

That's good to know.

So is Apple really abandoning Firewire?

So is Apple really abandoning Firewire?

The Intel Minis have Firewire ports, so they're not doing a big job of abandoment.

Thanks for the architecture advice, ND. I remembered readin on the side of a product box that they recommended Firewire for maxiumum performance, but they never said why.

Speaking of product boxes, the Microsoft iPod box video was created inside Microsoft.

So is Apple really abandoning Firewire?

If Apple were really abandoning Firewire, they wouldn't have put it in the new Intel boxes, let alone giving these new boxes the ability to boot from a Firewire drive (a feature that no other x86 box has).

So either I was misinformed, or I misunderstood, and got that idea from iPods abandoning Firewire.

They've made no announcements to that effect. They've dropped FW800 off the MacBooks, but it's still on the towers. They are also still happily selling the iSight, which is Firewire only, and promoting the features that it adds into iChat. My suspicion is that they are re-positioning FW800. FW400 will remain on the laptops, and if folks need 800 for their editing work on laptops they can add a card for it. I do fairly large multitrack editing on a laptop and FW400 more than handles the traffic, so I think the demand at the portable level for FW800 just isn't there.

Beyond that, I believe they share a controller on the laptops, so the FW800 and the FW400 port can end up fighting for bandwidth. As a result heavy users are already better off adding a third party FW800 interface.

The same thing that makes Firewire fast (the separate controller chip), was the same thing that was preventing Apple from making the iPods as thin as possible.