I'm an iPod owner now :)

[ignus]

well i finally got my bonus yesterday (:roll:) and went out to the apple store and got a 40gb iPod, and a nice hard case w/ belt clip to hold it. i also bought my friend's iTrip for $10 b/c he took back his iPod but forgot to return that and didn't need it anymore. got it all working and its great! havent tried it in my car yet, but we'll see later today how well that works.

my question though is should i go to the trouble of finding the FireWire port attachment for my mobo to use? will it go faster? b/c my mobo apparently only has USB1.0, and it was killing me to transfer music last night. i finally stopped it on song 400 something b/c i had to go to sleep. and it took at least 45 minutes for those 400 songs...

if firewire isnt a significant upgrade, im not sure i want to spend the time hooking up the firewire ports.

[TedHershey]

Firewire 400 is way faster than USB and on par or faster than USB 2 depending on how many devices are plugged in. Definitely get either firewire or USB 2. Personally I prefer firewire cuz when you plug in both your external drive and video cam, throughput stays the same, unlike USB 2, where it gets split. But that has nothing to do with the iPod.

I just bought a 20 gig iPod myself for my GF's b-day and am tempted to get one for myself, as I am starting to tire of swapping playlists all the time on my gen 1.

[Vygramul]

I am tempted to get the U2 iPod. Not because it's U2, but because it's black and red.

[TedHershey]

Ended up getting the GF a 14" iBook instead, so I'll be keeping the iPod for myself... :D

[ignus]

good news, my Audigy card has a built-in FireWire port :D saving me so much time! :lol:

iTrip seems to work great so far, the way it controls is a bit strange, but once you program it to a frequency you dont need to do anything else with it. it was definetly worth $10, probably even $40 ;)

[Demonite]

Nice move ignus. Did you get the iPod picture or whatever it's called? (the color screen one I mean)

I've always preferred USB2.0 personally as I find it goes faster than firewire, although Firewire charges the iPod as it transfers data :D (I use USB2.0 for my Creative Zen Xtra 60GB).

When Firewire 2 arrives though there should be no competition.... 8O

[TedHershey]

Firewire 800 has been out for a while now but there aren't many peripherals that use it yet. Would be cool if the iPod came with all three connectors, if that where possible. Would help push the Firewire 800 standard...

USB 2 (480mbps) is faster than Firewire 400 (400 mbps) but the speed boost is nominal, especially when you consider that firewire is isosynchronus and allows for 400 mbps for ALL peripherals as opposed to USB 2 which shares the 480 between all peripherals.

Guess that's not important to everyone, but if you are capturing video off of a USB 2 dv cam to a portable drive then all of a sudden it's half the speed of Firewire. A better example might be if you store your mp3 library on an external drive (makes good sense) and then try to update your iPod, you have again cut the throughput in half.

I guess I should also say that these are theoretical maximums, and that many who use both for external drives swear that Firewire 400 throughput is actually faster... I've never used USB 2 drives (for the reason given above) but I have 4 external firewire drives that I run all the time, two at a time (not including my iPod).