Comments on: FireWire vs. USB: Which Is Faster?

By: Paul Aaron Travis

Paul Aaron Travis — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 14:01:42 +0000

Thanks for all the discussion — I’ve been trying to decide what to do given my 13″ Macbook unibody was the one they removed Firewire from!

By: Kevin

Kevin — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 08:54:25 +0000

Don't forget it's also very easy to create a high speed network over firewire, which you can't do on USB. For whatever reason they pulled this OUT of windows, even though it used to be supported. Still works fine on Mac's though. Back before 100BT or faster ethernet was common, we would create FW networks at school in the late 90's to move video around to different computers in the edit bays since it was so much faster then 10BT.

By: Rick

Rick — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 08:49:03 +0000

It’s both ways. A lot of 2.5″ portable hard drives in external cases can run off bus powered USB. Some require 2 USB plugs tho, one that has data and power, the other just additional power. You could power a full size HD off the power available on a single firewire port, but you never see this. You can pump up to 45 Watts over a firewire cable along with data. USB maxes out with like 9 watts in “Charging mode” which has no data, and 500 mA over a cable with data. Micro USB will be the universal standard for cell phones moving ahead, which is great since proprietary cell phone chargers were a PITA. Too bad there never was a small firewire plug standard with power….
Mini Firewire (aka 4 pin, aka i.link) doesn’t have power.
Normal FW400 is a 6 pin, with power.
FW800 I believe has 9 pins, and is backwards compatible with older FW ports using adaptors.
FW3200 (3.2 gigabit) is finalized, uses the same connector as FW800, but probably won’t ever see the light of day in a shipping product. Lightpeak is the future….

By: Kevin

Kevin — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 08:32:18 +0000

Not to burst your bubble, but firewire is MUCH faster then USB2. The CPU overhead of USB isn’t nearly the factor it was 10 years ago, but it still exists. From Wiki:
“Firewire allows peer-to-peer device communication — such as communication between a scanner and a printer — to take place without using system memory or the CPU.”
So basically each port knows what’s up when plugged into another, they talk to each other directly without involving the CPU.
Also the amount of power you can send over Firewire compared to USB is huge for bus powered devices. 1.8 amps, 5.25 Volts, 9 Watts for dedicated charging (no data transfer) max over USB, while firewire can handle up to 30v, 45 watts.

By: best registry cleaner

best registry cleaner — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 17:14:44 +0000

I have had plenty of issues over the years with USB 2 so I prefer Firewire. I even bought the white Macbook about a year ago when they first put the 9400M in it over the Unibody one because it had Firewire.

By: Edouard B.

Edouard B. — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 01:16:53 +0000

I was surprised to find, after installing Snow Leopard on a 2006 iMac, that Time Machine suddenly worked badly or not at all on my Freecom FireWire 400 drive. It appears that the driver software was broken during the upgrade – thanks a bunch. It worked on a new Macbook Pro but, most galling, when I connected an NTFS formatted Buffalo drive to the iMac (cheaper), OS-X asked if I wanted to use one of the partitions (it correctly picked the empty one) as a Time Machine backup and then proceeded to outperform the (more recent) Macbook, huffing and puffing on it’s converted Firewire port.

Perhaps there’s a simple setting that would sort this out – my searches haven’t turned up anything obvious – so this is not to spoil everyone’s enthusiasm for Firewire, but to raise a warning flag.

By: Allister

Allister — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 08:12:33 +0000

The trouble with Firewire is apparently there is some skill to building the interfaces. I wanted a Firewire drive and had to get a triple-interface one to even get close to plain USB2 prices. But then that drive misbehaved badly. Froze, wouldn’t mount and even suffered corruption. So on a whim I ripped out the Firewire cable and swapped it for USB and it has been fine ever since. (Months.)

I’ve heard of other similar problems, usually with specific brands. (Mine was Seagate.) I’ve never heard of these sorts of problems with USB interfaces. Slow and steady is better than fast and f***ed any day.

By: isulzer

isulzer — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 21:07:34 +0000

erm… performance on USB 2 devices will be identical. It is more a matter of protocol design and hardware design. The driver running on the CPU will still be doing most of the work. The same dual channel problem with acks will still be there… etc. Now USB 3 devices… those will be fast. Nowhere near as fast as say… 6 gbits sata, or this theoretical light peak, but faster than any fire wire implementation in use today.

By: Alexis

Alexis — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:01:15 +0000

FireWire FireWire FireWire FireWire

is there any doubt…if you have ever used them FW400 or the King FW800 you know that there is piece of mind that you will not be sitting there all day waiting and waiting…

USB oh hell NO! it’s ok for charging stuff and for flash drives/mice/keyboards but for hard drives NEVER NEVER NEVER

USB3 may be great when it finally gets here and I have no experience because macs don’t have them and I wont use a PC so we will see when that day comes

my favorite thing is Backward compatibility and DAISY CHAIN

I have a Core Duo Mac Mini in the living room set up with 10 FW drives connected on the floor underneath…pushing 12 TB all Daisychained together using ONE FW400 port on my mini…and most of the drives are FW800/400/USB drives

nothing better than FireWire enough said

By: Twist

Twist — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:24:13 +0000