Triangles or strip for a rectangle?

I need to render a rectangle so I defined 4 verttices and used a triangle strip privimite. However, all exemples I see use 6 vertices and 2 triangle primitives to draw a rectangle... Isn't more effective to use a triangle strip?


Also, since my vertices never change, I tought using a static constant inside the shader. But again, most exemples I see pass the vertices to the shader even if they are constant. Is it preferable (performance wise) to always pass the vertices to the shader even if they never change?