[Walker]

Last night I was in a discussion with a good friend of mine who is both my intellectual superior and also is a high level engineer for Gateway Computers. He seems to have always kept an open mind towards Apple computers (that is, he's never bashed them around me) and we enjoy quite a few computing discussions.

Anyway, last night he and I were comparing firewire and USB 2.0. He came up with reason after reason why USB 2.0 is more practical than firewire, even after firewire has been updated to the faster standard (the high speed provided by the new firewire isn't truly going to be utilized by firewire devices).

About the only thing I could come up with is that I had heard somewhere that USB 2.0 was more processor intensive than firewire. Is this true? Or was I just imagining that I read it. Can anyone here verify it and explain how it works?

One thing we did agree on is that the iPod was certainly a strong reason for someone in the PC world to install a firewire card.

lw

[G4ME]

well I think this has been covered somewere before now but,

speed Firewire is 400mb/s USB 2.0 is 480mb/s theoreticly (SP) but in real world use, firewire is getting a faster rates then USB.

firewire needs no computer to connect, there are stand alone MIDI devices that have firewire interconects to link them all together

Power, in the 6 pin FW cables you can drive the perphials from the bus power, ipod, CF reader, Formac DV converter,

Use, firewire has been around for about 8 years now, back in 1994 apple actually pattened it, and the products started coming out around 2000 with CDRs and DV camcorders. which don't have USB 2.0.

for me i have no use for USB 2.0 already have FW and fFW can do anything USB can do and faster, if anything I will get FW 2.0 which will reach 800mb/s which is just insane

[chabig]

USB was designed to be a low speed serial bus modeled after Apple's ADB. It was never intended to be a high speed bus--that's what Firewire was for.

Intel decided to up the speed of USB for one reason only--they couldn't stand the thought of paying royalties to Apple.

Here is a good article that explains how USB 2.0 is supposed to work, and why it won't work so well in practice.

I can only think of one possible advantage USB 2.0 might have over Firewire and that is the fact that Intel will build it onto all of their motherboards. Technologically, I don't think USB 2.0 has a single advantage over Firewire while there are several disadvantages, as has already been pointed out:

1. You need a computer as a middleman between peripherals.

2. No bus power.

3. No isochronous data delivery. That means the bus can't guarantee timely delivery of data the way Firewire can. So if you play music from your USB hard drive on USB speakers, you might hear moments of silence. Firewire wouldn't do this.

4. Network configuration is now important--plug your USB 2 device into a USB 1 hub and it drops to USB 1 speeds.

Chris

[Eug]

Dammnit Jim, I'm not an engineer. But here goes anyway.

Here is a good article that explains how USB 2.0 is supposed to work, and why it won't work so well in practice.

From reading around the PC forums, it seems that USB 2.0 now works well enough, and about as well as Firewire does on PCs (almost anyway). ie. If you stick with name brand computers and peripherals, it usually works just fine, esp. if you keep USB 1 and 2 devices off the same bus.

1. You need a computer as a middleman between peripherals.

2. No bus power.

3. No isochronous data delivery. That means the bus can't guarantee timely delivery of data the way Firewire can. So if you play music from your USB hard drive on USB speakers, you might hear moments of silence. Firewire wouldn't do this.

4. Network configuration is now important--plug your USB 2 device into a USB 1 hub and it drops to USB 1 speeds.

1. Correct, and thus more cycles are used. However, as I understand it, a fast Firewire device will use more cycles than a slow USB 2 device. Furthermore, if I remember correctly, on a fast desktop, the differences in usage of cycles between USB 2 and Firewire are comparatively minor. The CPU usage is closer than some may think, although I'd have to reread the reviews to give you numbers.

2. Incorrect. USB 2 has bus power, albeit much less than Firewire. In the PC laptop world though it's actually the other way around most of the time. All PC laptops I've ever seen do not offer powered Firewire. I guess they think the required power draw is too much and thus opt for the 4-pin non-powered version of Firewire. Effectively it becomes the situation where USB 2 has low bus power and Firewire doesn't have any. That can be called a design flaw of PC laptops, but whatever the case that's the way it is. It makes Firewire on PC laptops potentially a big pain in the @ss, since stuff like some Firewire CompactFlash readers won't work at all unless you get a powered Firewire hub.

3. I dunno, but I would hope that software for music playback has sufficient buffering capabilities to compensate. If it didn't you might have problems even with just an IDE drive on some machines when multitasking. Speakers are a different matter, but I don't see the point of USB and Firewire speakers for 99% of the population to be honest.

Anyways, don't get me wrong because for the reasons mentioned previously I do much prefer Firewire. However, Firewire ain't perfect and USB 2 is a viable alternative. That, and the fact that USB 2 has no licencing costs and is getting a big push from Intel and friends (but notably not M$ so much at this juncture), will ensure that USB 2 will quickly become mainstream.