That's good practice for recording, regardless of which interface you choose, but it applies a little more to USB recording than Firewire for the reasons listed below: The short answer is that USB 2.0 should be fine, if you're just recording a few tracks at a time, although I would strongly recommend that the computer you use for recording be stripped-down as much as possible and used only (or mainly) for recording, without a lot of other stuff running in the background. Anybody ever have problems with USB?USB vs. So, I'm leaning towards the USB versus the Firewire. So if you are careful, patient, and know what you want, there are deals to be had if you don't need new stuff.
But there's all kinds of easy DIY links on the web of how to upgrade and install the caps. The only bad thing that's ever been said about this unit was that the power supply caps can go on them, and cause hum. I was patient, and watched ebay for a while and picked this up for $175.
They also have a ProTools that's made for it, which I don't have or need. This is the one with a rack mount breakout box(10 in, 10out). I used this as an excuse to upgrade my interface on my desktop, and after some research, decided on the M-Audio Delta 1010.
But it still works fine on my laptop, so it's back to it's original use, for my laptop. I thought it was the box, as I got it off of ebay for $35(the guy thought it was dead, all it was, was the power LED was burned out, the unit works perfect). It was also the interface I used on my desktop PC to run my nearfield monitors, and it worked flawless until something happened with XP. I also did a two track live to disc demo, that ended up sounding really good. Loaded the software, while the band was getting ready to come on! During their first song, I finished, and started recording. But it worked so good, the first time I used it was to record a band we were doing sound on. I bought it mainly to interface with PA and laptop to run SmaartLive(PC, don't own no Mac'). I've been lucky, and happy with my two M-Audio's.