USB 2.0 vs. Firewire 400 vs. eSATA

To backup my data I bought the external harddisk Western Digital My Book Home Edition with a capacity of 1 Terabyte which provides the following interfaces:

• 2 x Firewire 400
• 1 x USB 2.0
• 1 x eSATA

As I was curious to see how big is the difference between these interfaces I did some performance testing.

This are the results:

I did the perfomance testing under Windows Vista 64bit edition with the tool HDD Speed Test Tool by Marko Oette.
Regarding the eSATA interface I would like to say that the hot plug works (connect/disconnect while windows is running) and that while working with my computer I encountered sometimes some strange problems. The whole computer was blocked especially when I used applications that show an open file dialog or something similar. As soon as I unplugged the external HDD everything worked well. I would say that eSATA does not work 100%. This may be especially frustrating when making a backup of very large files and during the backup the HDD disappears (which happened to me). I don't exactly know if it is a driver, hardware or Windows Vista problem.

Wrong time under Vista in a domain

Recently I faced the following problem: my work computer is in a domain and unfortunately the clock of the server who provides the time for all clients is wrong. After trying to change my local clock I succeeded but only for a couple of minutes because then the old wrong time was used again. After an unsuccessful search on the Internet I found myself a solution for my problem. There exists a service which is called “Windows Time” and its description is:

“Maintains date and time synchronization on all clients and servers in the network. If this service is stopped, date and time synchronization will be unavailable. If this service is disabled, any services that explicitly depend on it will fail to start.”

After stopping this service and setting its start type to manual the problem was resolved.

CAUTION:

I do not know if switching off this service causes other things to not work correctly any more but till now I did not had any problems.