External Serial ATA versus Firewire HD

I am debating between getting the LaCie d2 Hard Drive Extreme with Triple (300GB) and the LaCie d2 Hard Drive Serial ATA (400GB).
I would be backing up a PowerMac G5 (160GB HD), Dell Laptop (80GB HD) and an ibook (40GB HD). They are connected by ethernet cables via Belkin router which is also connected to a Motorola cable modem (Time Warner/ISP). The PowerMac G5 would be running Retrospect.
If I am planning on using one of them to run backups at home, which would be faster? I would think the LaCie HD Serial ATA to be faster. Maybe it would not make a difference with my current setup. Also, I am probably limiting my self since there are no USB or Firewire ports on the LaCie HD Serial ATA.
On a side note...the Maxtor OneTouch II 500GB External Firewire looks interesting. The size of the drive is definitely a plus. I am just not sure if I am comfortable backing up to a larger drive in case it unexpectedly fails. Plus I read some users getting locked out because of the Maxtor's built in "DriveLock" feature. Has anyone had good experiences with a 500GB drive? I generally hear mixed experiences regardless of the manufacturer.
Here are the links to the PDF datasheets for the products I am considering for reference:
http://www.lacie.com/download/datasheets/d2hdSATAen.pdf
http://www.lacie.com/download/datasheets/d2extreme_tripleen.pdf
http://maxtor.com/files/maxtor/en_us/documentation/data_sheets/onetouch_iidatasheet.pdf
Thanks!
Power Mac G5 / 2GHz Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Oh, nobody seems to have answered your post so I'll give it a stab.
1: Serial ATA (SATA) is the fastest standard interface on PowerMac's only (far as I know), it's the interface connecting the internal drives. To get a external SATA you will need a SATA PCI card and external SATA drives. Unfortunatly other Mac's cannot connect to SATA as they use Firewire 400/800/USB. (there might be adpaters) So this might not be the best way to go. A triple interface external drive like the LaCie's Firewire 800/400/USB would be best for moving around different Mac's. However that doesn't mean you can't transfer data through the PowerMac from other Mac's to the external SATA drives, but your are bottlenecked by the slowest interface in the chain. So if you use a Firewire 400 network between the Mac's at that interfaces speed will be your over all performance. (Fastest interfaces: SATA, Firewire 800, then 400, then USB)
2: Windows uses a different disk formating than Mac's, so this will cause complications backing up a Windows machine to a common use drive. I advise getting a external drive just for that machine and "ghosting" or cloning the PC drive to it. Keeps the Windows problems off your Mac drives.
3: Another seperate drive for the iBook to clone to would be best. But you can take a larger drive and partition it to clone your PowerMac G5 to one partition and the iBook to another. Seperate drives is better as this gives you room to expand and use the drives for something else also if the partition map gets corrupted then you might have have trouble recovering data using utility software. Donationware Carbon Copy Cloner (visit the forums and read instructions for proper cloning) can help you clone or search Apple's site for Deja Vu for a great auto-cloning software.
4: When your using your network for the internet you can't be backing up, you need to creat a new network. Mac's can run more than one network at once. Via Airport, Ethernet, Firewire etc, each doing something different. So in your case a simple Firewire target disk mode may work perfectly for backing up the iBook through the PowerMac G5. All you have to do is use a 6-pin firewire 400 cable between the two machines and hold T and boot the iBook (or the PowerMac) the hard drive of the other appears on desktop of the other which simple drag n' drop can occur. Cloning requires booting and running cloning software from the machine being cloned and it will replace the other drive completely with the first drive (it's a clone) as this is the only way to duplicate a bootable drive. Cloning is best done drive to drive and it's not advised to run differnet Mac's with bootable clones from other Mac's as different Mac's have different OS's for their hardware.
5: A lot of these "big' drives are actually two drives in one case. Too much data in one hardware basket is asking for trouble. Plus they may be hot.
6: I have written some performance and other drive info (test download)
Large slow filled boot drives seriously affect Mac OS X performance.
clcik me
7: If your looking for internal drives, I recommend a 16MB cache to help the performance so look at this site
http://www.barefeats.com/hard63.html
8: You should read the book Mac OS X Tiger: The Missing Manual, it gives detailed steps and information to set up networks and other things.
Good luck and Happy Holidays.

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I need to backup by ibook, a PC laptop and a iMacG5. I was checking out LaCie's HD. I am think about purchasing either the LaCie d2 Hard Drive Extreme with Triple (300GB), LaCie d2 Hard Drive Serial ATA (400GB) or the LaCie Ethernet mini-disk (400GB).
I would be running Retrospect from my iBook. Everything is connected by cables through a router. The router is connected to a Road Runner cable. I am not sure what the speed of my connections are.
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Was wondering why you are considering a ATA drive? The iMac G5 als has a serial ata drive already.
If you are considering an external drive, then you have a problem. The most important thing there is that you get a drive with firewire interface because I think they are the fastest, but USB is an ok choice. If there is an external firewire drive that also uses a serial ATA drive inside of it, then that would be an excellent choice for speed. USB or Firewire are standards for connecting a peripherial to you Mac. An external drive will probably have a very common, read Mactor, WD, Seagate, ATA drive in it. The external drive case has a interface inside of it which allows USB or Firewire to speak with the ATA drive, any flavor. Some people just purchase a powered external 3 1/2 case and install the hd they like the best, that is the nice thing about standards.
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