firewire vs esata

hi i am new to this forum
i need some help

i have purchased a dell inspiron 1520

how do i know if it is esata enabled how do i get esata card

if i purchase a 3.5" external 500gb hard drive (edge) it has usb2.0/firewire

will it be better than the

3.5" external 500gb hard drive (iomega) esata/usb2.0

thank you

 

eSATA is much better than Firewire, however your laptop would have to support it, or you'd have to buy an eSATA PC/Express Card.

I haven't kept up with Dell's latest models, but I hadn't known of one with eSATA support built-in. The only laptops I've seen so far with built-in eSATA are the Asus G series, but I admittedly haven't looked for it either.

If your primary concern is performance, and if you don't use your PC/Express Card slot for anything else, I'd say go for an eSATA card and drive -- the performance will be virtually identical to internal drive performance. Second best would be Firewire 800, but typically Macs are the only ones that support it. Followed by Firewire 400 (ordinary 1394 Firewire), which has similar (actually slightly lower) theoretical bandwidth to USB, but Firewire uses a tighter clocked and more reliable signal that results in typically faster transfers while using less CPU than USB. And of course USB is the most universal, so it's nice to have available on the drive if you intend to move it between PC's.

 

You'd need an eSata Expresscard, much like the one reviewed here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=84710

eSATA is much faster than any other method of connecting a hard drive.

 

Like was said...Firewire 1394a is only as fast as USB 2.0. 1394b is a little better, but anything using the SATA bus will smoke them all. Multiple times faster, even...fast enough to remove any bottleneck.

 

Yep. The bottleneck would be the drive if you were to use ESATA.

 

thnx a lot

u guys have just cleared my doubts