Serial ata 133 vs ata 66 vs lacie firewire external d2 drive speed issues

I have an older power mac tower that has built in ata 66. I have a large music collection (300 gigs) that resides in a lacie firewire (D2) external drive. When I make a play list, itunes makes me wait about 20 seconds to create the playlist which drives me crazy (spinning beachball). I also use the computer for logic pro.
I want to increase the internal capacity of this computer. I am wondering....is the external firewire drive faster than what an ata 133, 7200 rpm internal drive would be. Secondly, is ata 133 really that much faster than ata 66. Thirdly, does anyone know if drive speed has anything to do with the itunes sluggishness?
Any suggestions?
power mac g4 dual 450 Mac OS X (10.4.1)

Wow. I was thinking of posting a similar question myself. I have a G3 as a hardware router (for filtering) and I was wondering how to speed it up.
The research I've done so far has yielded these tidbits:
1) ATA 133 isn't much faster than ATA 66 for a single drive. Why? Most drives don't transfer data quickly enough to use the whole 66 Mb/sec bandwidth of ATA 66 anyways. The newest drives that have burst speeds above 66 Mbs could make a difference, but burst speeds are rarely achieved. I've been looking and I've found lots of ATA 100 drives, but no ATA 133 drives. You'd have to get a 10k Raptor or a RAID setup to see an appreciable difference from ATA 66 to ATA 133.
2) The upper speed limit of FW 400 is 50 Mb/sec. However, the data goes through the FW bridge, which then gets fed to the native IDE drive on the other side. This takes time. External FW drives of the same RPM and protocol (ATA 33, etc) are slightly slower than their internal brethren.
HTH,
~FifthWheel

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