Whats the difference between SCSI, IDE, USB and FireWire hard drives?
A The acronyms that describe hard drive interfaces sound scarier than they really are. USB (Universal Serial Bus) is a standard designed more for mice and scanners than hard drives. But some manufacturers decided that since the connection is so easy to use, consumers could use USB hard drives too. Video editors should avoid these drives like the plague. USB drives are too slow for video, so knock those off the list at once. Next, there are FireWire drives. These are really IDE drives put into a special external boxes that translate the IDE interface into the video-friendly FireWire (IEEE 1394 or i.LINK) interface. These drives are usually substantially more expensive than their SCSI and IDE counterparts. Consider them for archiving completed projects or for an editing system on a laptop computer (because these drives are small and portable). For the additional cost, however, they are not significantly faster than SCSI drives. Now come the real workhorses of the hard drive interfacesIDE
