which is faster? IDE or USB 2.0?

[Sensai]

I have a 40 gig Maxtor 7200 rpm 2 mb buffer ata-100 that i use as a 2ndary master drive for media files. I have a PC at home and school so i want to transfer stuff w/o burning disks. I got a maxtor usb 2.0 pci card and was thinking about getting a 3 1/2 usb 2.0 enclosure. Would going from IDE to USB 2.0 make the drive performance slower? Would it make a difference in performance in the cable / enclosure brand?

 

[corkyg]

IDE is significantly faster than USB 2 for data transfer.

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: corky-g
IDE is significantly faster than USB 2 for data transfer.

This site makes the opposite claim (at least for transfering files between an IDE and USB2 drive)
Bill

 

[Kingofcomputer]

from http://www.usb.org/faq/ans2#q1

Q1: How fast is USB?
A1: High speed USB products have a design data rate of 480 Mb/s. Full speed USB devices signal at 12Mb/s, while low speed devices use a 1.5Mb/s subchannel.

Q2: How does this compare to other connections used with PCs and workstations?
A2: Here's a quick list of the maximum transfer rates for various connections in megabits (Mb) and megabytes (MB) per second:

serial port: 115kbits/s (.115Mbits/s)
standard parallel port: 115kBYTES/s (.115MBYTES/s)
Original USB: 12Mbits/s (1.5MBYTES/s)
ECP/EPP parallel port: 3MBYTES/s
IDE: 3.3-16.7MBYTES/s
SCSI-1: 5MBYTES/s
SCSI-2 (Fast SCSI, Fast Narrow SCSI): 10MBYTES/s
Fast Wide SCSI (Wide SCSI): 20MBYTES/s
Ultra SCSI (SCSI-3, Fast-20, Ultra Narrow): 20MBYTES/s
UltraIDE: 33MBYTES/s
Wide Ultra SCSI (Fast Wide 20): 40MBYTES/s
Ultra2 SCSI: 40MBYTES/s
IEEE-1394: 100-400Mbits/s (12.5--50MBYTES/s)
Hi-Speed USB: 480Mbits/s
Wide Ultra2 SCSI: 80MBYTES/s
Ultra3 SCSI: 80MBYTES/s
Wide Ultra3 SCSI: 160MBYTES/s
FC-AL Fiber Channel: 100-400MBYTES/s

The fastest connection commonly found on PCs is UltraIDE, which is used for hard drives and CD-ROMs.

 

[alexruiz]

Originally posted by: bsobel

Originally posted by: corky-g
IDE is significantly faster than USB 2 for data transfer.

This site makes the opposite claim (at least for transfering files between an IDE and USB2 drive)
Bill

That is the first review showing that kind of result. I am pretty sure both internal hard drives were attached to the same IDE channel or something was wrong. 8 MB/sec in an IDE drive...... no way!

 

[Peter]

Given that _all_ external USB drives are IDE drives with an USB-IDE adapter slapped on, it is of course completely impossible for an "USB" drive to be faster than the same drive on a direct IDE connection.

Poor IDE copy performance is something you get if you copy across two drives on the same IDE cable.