External Hard Drive Options for Back Up - USB 2.0 or FireWire

Needing some advice on this one. Looking to purchase an external hard drive for back up through Time Machine - also running Win XP via Parallels. Should I go USB 2.0 or FireWire or have both options? Is there any difference in speed? I will be also using the external hard drive as needed for other manual back ups and data transfers eg movie projects. (and yes the Macbook has Firewire).
Would appreciate some comment / recommendations.

Hey Pluke and welcome to the forum -
Firewire is faster overall for data transfers especially large or lengthy ones. With this in mind, I would use an external enclosure that has both Firewire and USB.
I'm not sure if this was part of your question or not but I would not include your virtual machine (xp) in your Time Machine backup. The reason is it will fill up your backup drive quickly because your TM backup copies hourly every file that has changes made to it. Your VM file is both large (the size of the virtual drive) and has changes even if you just have it open and not really using it. You should include your VM file in your manual backup instead.
-GDF

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