I no longer have sandra.I do have an external enclosure of each flavor.When I put my Plextor 40x cdrw in the firewire,I burn at 40x and do a cd in 3min 12sec.When I put the same drive in the USB 2 enclosure it burns at a max of 24x and 4 min flat.Same media,same Dell 8200 P4 2200.As for which is more common,that is a difficult choice.The usb can work with the older slower 1.1 standard.Most higher end laptops have firewire,as well as the Audigy equipt systems.I prefer firewire,but I recently had to put software on a Panasonic Toughbook with no cd drive.It did not have firewire,or usb 2.It did have usb 1.1,so I used the usb 2 enclosure.It only copied
at about 6x however. I did buy a second 24x cdrw for the usb 2 unit,but it would be nice to have one unit that I could take on the road with me.I could use it with whatever my clients machine has.