Why is it that I have never seen any device in IRL, or on the 'Net that plugs into the Firewire or 1394 port? Why is the predominant socket USB? I'm not sure if this is the right forum to be posting in, but it seemed the best. H.B.
Firewire needs an additional chipset, USB is native. Firewire is lisenced by Sony (and Apple?) iirc, whereas USB is an open standard. It's FAR better than USB. It's daisy-chainable, point to point network capable and faster than USB.
Thanks, I'd been wondering about it for a long time. If as you say it's faster that USB, it's a shame it hasn't had more widespread adoption, or that USB couldn't be upgraded to be faster. Firewire flashdrives/pendrives? H.B.
I thought it was primarily an apple thing, the original iPods didn't succeed massively because they were firewire only and at the time there was no market penetration. I've only even seen a Firewire webcam in real life and that had extra ports on the back.
I have my main PC and Powerbook networked via Firewire sometimes. I've got a Firewire CF memory card reader. My next camera will have Firewire (1Ds mkII hopefully). Certain people out there love Firewire (me included).
my DV camera has firewire on it, in fact its the only connection method, but I need to send it off soon to Canon and the sensor has come de-soldered (apparently a common thing in this model so its a free repair).
All of the external HDDs and DVD-RW drives I've had have had firewire ports. It's certainly a lot better for devices like these and I've never had those "delayed write failure" messages with Firewire that I had when copying loads of files over USB. Shame it's not used for more devices, but one standard will always win over the other, and it's not always the best one that wins...
I use firewire to connect my LCD TV and the Cable Box together. you tend to find firewire on bandwidth hungry devices, external drives, audio/video mixing tables, or tv tuner/importers.
If only USB could be a host-less system (like Firewire). Firewire seems so awesome and I've always wanted to try it out, but I've never seen any Firewire devices IRL.
I've only used firewire a few times, but am yet to get any device that really warrents it.. as for the networking thing, I've used it a few times to link 2 macs together and boot one from the other's HDD etc... was absolutely amazing for me!
USB: 10-12Mbps Firewire 400: 400Mbps USB 2.0: 480Mbps Firewire 800: 800Mbps Firewire 1600 (Coming soon): 1600Mbps Firewire 3200 (Coming soon): 3200Mbps
IEEE1394b is very fast. You'll only notice the improvement, if only slightly, over USB 2.0 when plugging in external hard drives. It is an Apple technology, I'm informed.
From what I've heard, it;s actually quite uncommon for a device to be able to come close to the USB2.0 max transfer speed of 480Mbps as the controller chips used are usually slower than that. Never actually measured, though...
It is because many PC's don't have Firewire, so they must use USB, which is more common. But, I think personally that Firewire is better, it is very fast and more reliable than USB 2.
It does have the downside, though, of not being entirely safe for hot-plugging. I've never personally heard of damage from hot-plugging USB devices, whereas it seems to be somewhat common with Firewire, for whatever reason. Additionally, the external Firewire sound card that I use for recording came with a big warning about not plugging in or out the firewire devices until both devices being connected are switched off. That makes me quite paranoid about moving the sound card too much when my system is on, in fear of the cable coming loose..
Indeed. We just had to send our Sony Z1 for repair because the Firewire port died on us. Now, I make sure that any device is powered off before inserting or removing the plug. Having said that, all of our external drives (4 or 5 of various types) are running on Firewire. They have some pretty decent transfer rates; faster than USB. -monkey
