SATA II verses Firewire 800 External Hard Drive

I want to add a 500MB external disk to a 866MHz G4. I have bought LaCie products before and had no problems so I was looking at their offerings.
The two main choices I see are:
A. 500GB Big Disk that supports Firewire 800 + Firewire 800 PCI card.
Issues
1. I can connect the disk to my iBook using Firewire 400
2. If I got a new Mac it will probably come with Firewire 800 so can be used.
3. Available now.
B. 500GB Two Big disk (shipping 2/1) that supports SATA II and comes with a SATA II PCI card.
Issues
1. Better access speed (looks like 115MB/s v 75-80MB/s)
2. The SATA II card will not work in a new Mac as it is PCI/PCIX and not PCI Express.
3. Cannot connect to my iBook.
3. Shipping 2/1.
The price difference is only $30 more for the SATA II.
I am trying to figure out if the improved performance of the SATA II drive will be significant enough to be the deciding factor. Or is the performance difference not going to be that noticeable and the convenience of Firewire would be a better choice.
Any experiences/thoughts?
Thanks,
-Tony
866 G4 Mac OS X (10.4.4)

Thanks for all the info:-)
Both the LaCie external drives I was looking at are stripped RAIDs with two 250GB drives.
The Firewire 800 drive also has a Firewire 400 and USB 2.0 port so I am assuming that means I can use a standard Firewire 400 cable.
The LaCie SATA II card comes with the drive, has multiple ports and does claim to support booting.
I will check on the deep sleep issue with regards to the LaCie 800 card.
If I were to get a new Mac I would probably replace the desktop machine. I wondered if Apple would adopt SATA II in place of Firewire 800. I seemed to be getting the impression that Firewire 800 has not been very popular but external SATA drives are getting more popular. Plus SATA II seemes to offer better performance than Firewire 800.
I was intending to use the drive for video editing DV material using FinalCut Pro so disk performance may be more noticeable. That is why I was looking at striped RAID drives.
-Tony

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