[sworthy]

Advantages or disadvantages with either? USB2 seems to have faster transfer rates (480 to 400), but I keep hearing that firewire is better, especially by my fellow mac users. Which should I choose?

[robby818]

This article discusses firewire 800 as well as firewire v. usb in general. the article confirms my experiences. firewire is the more robust protocol- much more reliable than usb at transferring large amounts of data. when it comes to moving gigs of data I would use firewire. take theoretical transfer rates w a grain of salt, reliability is just as important as speed.

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20040402/index.html

[f1000]

OS X can boot from a Firewire drive; I don't know whether it can from a USB 2 drive.

EDIT: I just wanted to mention that the Iogear ION USB 2.0 / Firewire enclosure will NOT work as a boot drive. I hope that Apple will address this issue.

http://www.iogear.com/main.php?loc=p...product_id=425

[tooki]

The 400/800 and 480Mbit/sec rates you see are the raw data rates. The data payload for FireWire 400 is actually higher than for USB 2 -- the latter seems to have substantially higher overhead, both on Mac and Windows. This probably stems from the fact that USB was originally developed to complement FireWire and other high-speed buses: it was supposed to be a (comparatively) low-speed bus for gadgets like mice and printers that don't communicate large amounts of data. It was never envisioned for high-speed data. FireWire was designed to be a high-speed interconnect from the beginning, and so it excels at it.

tooki

[Ω]

I bought 2 Lacie 250GB FW800 USB2 HD's. One for my laptop running FW400, the other for a colleague running USB2.

FW400 spanks USB2. So much so he is looking at putting a FW card in his PC. I shudder to think how fast FW800 is.

This of course is just my opinion, but transfer rates seemed tragically slow with USB.

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally posted by tooki:
FireWire was designed to be a high-speed interconnect from the beginning, and so it excels at it.

FireWire was also designed for constant data streams and A/V use, which is why it's the standard connector on digital video cams.

USB2 apparently sends in bursts, making it unsuitable for anything video and audio.

Also, I read a comparative test some time ago where FireWire 400 spanked USB2 by an average of something like 70% higher sustained transfer rates.

As so often, USB2 is faster on paper only.

-s*

[tooki]

FireWire has always had an "isochronous" mode for streaming. For example, when a DV camera starts talking to the computer, it'll tell FireWire to reserve the 3.6MB/sec it needs. Those are no longer available to other data on the bus, they are reserved.

USB originally had no such mode, but it was added later on.

tooki

[veryniceguy2002]

Originally posted by sworthy:
Advantages or disadvantages with either? USB2 seems to have faster transfer rates (480 to 400), but I keep hearing that firewire is better, especially by my fellow mac users. Which should I choose?

One bad thing (well, Intel claims it's a good time for backward compatibility) about USB2 is that if you have any devices (hub, mouse, keyboard, etc) that is only USB1 compatible, it would cause everything in that USB chain to run in USB1 speed. Therefore if you plug your USB2 hard drive into a chain which has has your mouse etc you won't get USB 2 speed at all. (That's why Apple have seperate USB1 and USB2 ports nowadays, using seperate USB controllers).

Firewire won't run into that sort of problem.

[tooki]

Uhh, Apple doesn't have separate USB 2 ports.

Just like PC's, they use USB 2 controllers with an internal switch that routes each port to the most appropriate controller. Internally, it has two USB 1.1 buses and one USB 2 bus. Regardless of what port something's plugged in to, the switch will route it to the correct bus.

What is true is that if you have a USB 1.1 hub, you won't get USB 2 through it. But not getting USB 2 "on the same bus" is pure and utter hooey. (It may have been true on some very early USB 2 controllers, but certainly isn't true now.)

Note that the USB 2 controller is not built into the system controller chip, which has its own built-in USB 1.1 controller. The two buses provided by the system controller chip (which were the buses actually used when Macs were just USB 1.1) are now reserved for the internal modem and Bluetooth modules.

tooki

[CIA]

If the ONLY thing you are using on the USB2 bus is a CD-RW or HD, (1 device on the bus) then USB2 rocks. Otherwise, go FW all the way.

[tooki]

Ugh... FireWire is always superior to USB 2.

And as I said, USB 1.1 devices will not be connected to the USB 2 bus, regardless of what port they're plugged in to.

tooki

[CIA]

For everyday use, and having just 1 device hooked up, I don't think you would notice the difference between a FW hard drive and a USB2 one. Beyond 1 device, FW is the way to go. As a standard, FW is much better, but like I said, for everyday use with singe devices such as HD's and CD-RW's, you would not see much of a difference. If you need performance, go FW800.

[SSharon]

I have two firewire (400) / USB 2.0 cases both with 7200rpm 8mb cache hard drives and firewire transfers have always been about 5mb/s faster. That's per second. I also noticed that firewire handles large files much better than USB2. For example it will copy a 1gb movie file faster than 1gb of mp3's. Now I think this should be true for everything, but USB seems to handle thousands of smaller files better.

Of course my advice is go with Firewire, it is almost always faster and definately more reliable.

A quick question though: Why does my Mac (10.3.3) mount my HD's as USB and not firewire if both cables are plugged in? It must know that Firewire is better, I guess it just checks USB first and then ignores the firewire connection.