one of those articles talks about how Firewire is daisy chained togethor whereas USB has to go through a hub... the hub is alot better.
In my experience with firewire, once you start daisychaining you get alot of signal loss and corruption... we had an external drive daisy chained through a burner, and got massive corruption when writing files. worked perfectly directly connected to the computer though (a sony laptop, around 2002 firewire came standard on those...might still). We thought it might have just been a problem with the burner, but when we daisy chained the burner through the drive we started getting alot of coasters when burning stuff. then we daisy chained the drive through a camera or something... same corruption. we even tried a different laptop...
I'm not trying to put firewire down with this post... just warning everyone, dont daisy chain if dataloss is something that could be a problem.