firewire or USB for external music storage drive?


Are there any advantages to using a firewire 400 interface for a terabyte Western Digital hard drive with music stored as FLAC files over using the USB 2.0 interface?

The laptop is running XP with the last service pack and the audio is using Jriver Mediacenter ver 12 with ASIO for USB output.

I use a Hag usb converter to go to my old sonic frontier MkII DAC.
tcatman
all good except that you will find many more USB DACs then FW DACs

I was under the impression the poster was asking about storage devices to store the music library on, and not about DACs.

If you are asking about the DAC interface I'd be looking at asynchronous USB DACs. Firewire DACs are few and far between, partially because software needs to be written for each operating system and update thereof in order to use the DAC. There are other advantages to the USB interface from the functional standpoint. There's another thread on this subject here which gets into the interface debate where the DACs are concerned, but you'll have to sift through quite a few responses.

From that thread, definitely check out these interviews for some interesting viewpoints on the current state of computer audio.
Jax - my bad - thnx for setting me right

I think it's all been well said by the other poster -

the only thing I can contribute is that in my experience I have seen no evidence that USB robbing the processor of cycles is an issue in any way, shape or form - now if we were talking about video it might be an issue but then we'd also be talking about FW800
Thanks all

I an currently using the USB 2.0 cable to the hard drive. The only change I made to the standard setup of JRiver was to increase the buffering of the Asio driver by about 20%. It correlated with removing the occasional dropout.

So it looks like my old laptop is fast enough as a stand alone music player for red book flac 'd content.

I was also curious about the newer high resolution formats. So based on this conversation the Hard drive to PC through USB 2.0 won't be a problem since the file size will just be larger and a high resolution DAC will take care of the rest.

Thanks
About the usb dac thing, and I know that isn't what the original poster was asking - while Firewire Dacs are few, firewire to spdif converters aren't, and they are relatively inexpensive ($200), so you wouldn't be limited to a USB dac - you can get any dac you wish.