That does sound very odd. On my next older mac all USB ports were 1.0 or 1.1 whichever. It just was not practical for me to use USB except for keyboard & mouse. I used firewire 400. And of course on my new mac I use firewire 800. Both are apparently faster than USB 2 in practice or so I've read (despite USB 2's supposed capabilities), especially for external drives. USB 2.0 is supposed to be capable of up to 480 Mbps but apparently Firewire 400 (400 Mbps) in practice tends to be faster. Likewise FW 800 is double FW 400's speed.

I think earlier I suggested firewire to PickaxeFairy, but if it's an older computer then perhaps waiting till the next machine might be better so you get faster all round speeds (cpu, bus speed, ram, etc.) And there are faster options around now than firewire 800 such as eSATA which is up to 3Gbps (though its burst speed I think is only double FW 800's burst speed.)

On that topic I notice external drives seem to have dropped price this year since 4 GB drives are now on the market. Last two I bought were 1 TB ext drives.