Posted 06/26/2008 at 12:57:29pm

While it's true that a FW 800 port can be used to feed a FW400 device, here's a case where having both helped me decide to go with the MBP.  I am a semi-pro musician and I use my MBP as a mobile recording studio (yep, and GarageBand is all the software I need).    

When choosing an  interface box, I completely skipped anything that limited me to a USB connection, because I've heard too many gripes from folks who say that the USB connection leads to skips, odd pops, etc in the recorded signal.  I use a Presonus Firebox 10 and it is clean, clear and transparent.  

Anyway, that talks to my MBP via FW400 and the MBP sends the processed data straight to an external FW800 drive.  I believe that this gives me a cleaner path than the on-board drive because the boot drive is used for paging memory, etc.   Can't do this without both ports.  Thanks for the article.