USB2 vs Firewire

I recently had the pleasure of doing some video editing for some friends for their wedding video - I'll not say who as its still not done which is embarassing. The first hurdle I had after getting the tapes to transfer in was moving the captured DV streams to an external drive so I could work on both the desktop and the laptop.


So... importing DV, it has to be done in real time on my kit, so 3x90mins of video takes just a bit longer than 3x90 minutes. Copying it however, should run at a fair speed - especially to a USB2 device right? USB2 is 480Mbit/s vs Firewire at 400Mbit/s - nearly 20% faster!


Wrong... 2 hours, 6 hours, 18 hours and the estimate just went up and up.


I gave up in the end, and strung the laptop and desktop together with a Firewire cable for 18 minutes. Even considering the two systems cache the data in RAM over the transfer, its still ridiculously faster.


I for one won't be giving up on Firewire any time soon!