This excerpt from Wikipedia on USB includes a blurb on Firewire and basically informs us that Firewire would be the fastest connection for your purposes. Make sure you do not get MB/s (Megabytes per second) and Mb/s (Megabits per second) confused.
Transfer speeds in practice
As of 2004[update], the actual
throughput of USB 2.0 high bandwidth
attained with a hard drive tested on a
Mac was about 18 MiB/s, 30% of the
maximum theoretical bulk data transfer
rate of 57 MiB/s (480 Mbit/s). On
Windows, the highest speed observed
was 33 MiB/s, or 60% of the
theoretical max. The drive could reach
58 MiB/s on Firewire, so the drive's
speed was not a limiting factor.[54]
According to a USB-IF chairman, "at
least 10 to 15 percent of the stated
peak 60 MB/s (480 Mbit/s) of Hi-Speed
USB goes to overhead — the
communication protocol between the
card and the peripheral. Overhead is a
component of all connectivity
standards."[55] Tables illustrating
the transfer limits are shown in
Chapter 5 of the USB spec.
Typical high bandwidth USB devices
operate at lower data rates, often
about 3 MiB/s overall, sometimes up to
10–20 MiB/s.[citation needed] For USB
1.1, an average transfer speed of 880 KiB/s has been observed.[citation
needed]
For isochronous devices like audio
streams, the bandwidth is constant,
and reserved exclusively for a given
device. The bus bandwidth therefore
only has an effect on the number of
channels that can be sent at a time,
not the "speed" or latency of the
transmission.
