If you have not already bought a burner I do have a bit of advice. I own a lacie usb burner for my mac at home and love it except that because of usb's slow connection you'll only be able to burn at 4x max which is fine for audio (I will not burn above 2x for that) If you are going to use it a great deal for archiving I would either get a scusi card and go with again a lacie or an aps. As far as firewire is concerned, I do not know anyone that owns one. I would be super fast 12x?, but I have still not dropped all my eggs in that basket. It seems that there may still be a few bugs to work out. I could be wrong.