How much faster is this than the Fire Wire external drive that I’ve been using for two years?
From the specs it looks to be over twice the throughput on a hard drive, probably more with a faster device.
Although it gives that high 5 Gb/sec transfer rate, the USB standard has high overhead. That’s how a FireWire 400 Mb/sec can generally beat the USB 2 at 480 Mb/sec by a wide margin. So expect it to be slower than other standards in real life than the raw spec might imply.
In any case, all of these next-gen standards, USB, FireWire and eSATA are faster than any one hard drive. You’ll need to hook it up to a RAID or solid state disk to saturate it.