FireWire 800 vs USB 2.0

We here at MG are currently in need of running some pretty I/O-heavy apps on external storage. Additionally, it's not a small app either, but somewhere close to the half TB.
At the same time, the external storage needs to remain portable - no NAS or similar. We need to be able to take the stuff with us on the road.

Since we're an AlmostOnlyApple-Shop, the external device needs to be mucho compatible with the MacBook Pros we're carrying around. So our preferred hardware supplier HSD provided us with two 750 GB Freecom Mobile Drive Mg (5400rrpm, 8 MB) as the best trade-off between portability and performance. One disk came with a USB 3.0 Interface, the other with both USB 3.0 & FireWire 800.

So test-wise, I copied a VMWare virtual machine from the MacBook to the disks back and forth. Since the MB Pro is USB 2.0-only, the results were as expected.

Here's further specs...

• MacBook Pro6,2 ; Intel Core i7 2.66GHz ; 8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3; OS X 10.6.7
• $> du -ks vm.vmwarevm
27556532 vm.vmwarevm
• $> mount
(...snip...)
/dev/disk4s2 on /Volumes/FREECOM HDD (hfs, local, nodev, nosuid, journaled, noowners)
• $> cp -pRv "${source}" "${target}"

... and the results:

• 753 sec - fw800 - write => ~36.6 MB/sec
• 565 sec - fw800 - read => ~48.8 MB/sec
• 1254 sec - usb 2.0 - write => ~22.0 MB/sec
• 919 sec - usb 2.0 - read => ~30.0 MB/sec

So, is the FW800 performance enough for the I/O heavy appliance we're planning to run on it?
No know yet.
Will report back ;)