Firewire ???

[unclemeat]

Hi, can someone explain to me what Firewire is, it's uses, and it's advantages and disadvantages. Thanks!!!

[meese]

http://www.techtv.com/callforhelp/st...195006,00.html

[John Prophet]

Do you know what USB is?? Firewire is a simliar but competing standard.

Its just a way to hook peripherals up to a comp. It came from Apple. It was interesting at first because at the time it was way faster than usb..but now USB 2 has caught on and it is slightly faster than firewire and wayyyyyyyyy more prevalant. Firewire is seen a lot on digital camcorders....so if you are into them you usually want a firewire port on the front of your comp so you can just download straight from the camcorder to the pc.

[Dputiger]

One caveat, however. Repeated benchmarks have shown that external hard drives are MUCH faster over FireWire then USB 2.0--nearly twice as fast, in fact.

This is using the SAME drive (meaning drives that support both standards). Whether this is because of controller-chip issues or because of how HDD's access the bus I'm not sure, but if I were looking at an external HDD, I'd go FireWire over USB 2.0 all the way.

[SpookyEddy]

The IEEE1394 spec (for which Apple coined the term Firewire) just describes a serial bus, in many ways similar to USB found in most modern computers.

Firewire traditionally supported up to 400 Mbps, compared to the 12 Mbps offered by USB1.1, making it popular for connecting relatively bandwidth hungry devices such as digital video cameras and external storage (hard disks etc). Recently the spec received a bump up to 800 Mbps in response to the release of USB2.0 (480 Mbps).

Many users remain critical of the higher CPU utilisation and lower "real world" performance offered by USB2.0 when compared to Firewire, as ever YMMV.

Regards

ed

[John Prophet]

Something semi related..reviewing and comparing usb 2 controllers and discussing the limitations.

I agree that on comparisons of firewire ext devices vs usb 2..the firewire is usually faster.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/sto...speed-ubs.html