USB2.0/firewire
- Thread starter sy69
- Start date
Horses for courses.
Firewire is nominally slower than USB2... (400 Mb/s for firewire, 480 Mb/s for USB2) but they work in different ways. Effectively firewire devices are 'intelligent'. When connected they negotiate between themselves to find the most efficient way to transfer data. USB2 devices are dumb. All USB transfers are marshalled by a host computer, whch means they are more inefficient. That adds an overhead, and means that you'll never actually achieve anything like 480Mb/s with a USB2 transfer. You'll never actually achieve 400 Mb/s over firewire either but you'll get close to it, and in reality a firewire transfer will always be faster than USB2
The way it works out, the higher the ratio of total data size to number of files, then the greater the gap between firewire and USB2 will be.
There is a but though. USB ports are much more widely available. Every PC has a USB port, firewire ports are much less common. For real world situations, that's probably a more important consideration than maximum throughput.
You can get cards & external drives which support both interfaces, and consequently offer the best of both worlds, but you'll pay a premium for them. In reality, a USB2 drive will be fine for most applications, and will be cheaper.
Firewire is nominally slower than USB2... (400 Mb/s for firewire, 480 Mb/s for USB2) but they work in different ways. Effectively firewire devices are 'intelligent'. When connected they negotiate between themselves to find the most efficient way to transfer data. USB2 devices are dumb. All USB transfers are marshalled by a host computer, whch means they are more inefficient. That adds an overhead, and means that you'll never actually achieve anything like 480Mb/s with a USB2 transfer. You'll never actually achieve 400 Mb/s over firewire either but you'll get close to it, and in reality a firewire transfer will always be faster than USB2
The way it works out, the higher the ratio of total data size to number of files, then the greater the gap between firewire and USB2 will be.
There is a but though. USB ports are much more widely available. Every PC has a USB port, firewire ports are much less common. For real world situations, that's probably a more important consideration than maximum throughput.
You can get cards & external drives which support both interfaces, and consequently offer the best of both worlds, but you'll pay a premium for them. In reality, a USB2 drive will be fine for most applications, and will be cheaper.
