Which is Faster: USB or FireWire?

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Chris Pirillo

Chris,

For mass storage, yes, I can see Firewire losing ground to USB. That said, for applications like sound recording there are things that Firewire was designed to do that USB does not.

For instance, simultaneous multi-track recording. USB breakout boxes and mixers only send two channels while Firewire devices can send as many individual tracks as your computer can handle.

That’s just one example. There could be more. Or not. ;)

Regards,

-jf.

–
John Federico
http://www.odmcast.com

For your information I have been running a Firewire 800 drive for more than a year and a half. Firewire is not going to disappear any time soon. You have to keep in mind what Firewire is was originally designed to replace SCSI. In addition, Firewire 1600 and 3200 is just around the corner. As we head towards high definition products it will become very evident how much better firewire will be than USB. USB will be far to slow.

Is FW 800 is the last stop, though? The tech still has way way less CPU dependency, is hot pluggable, doesn’t require a host computer to run, and supports IP. Make mine FireWire.

DId I miss something? Wasn’t the title about which was faster? This blog just mentions that USB is better because it is universal. Firewire 800 still is faster than USB 2 and I do not see Apple dropping this standard, nor hard drive manufacturers. My firewire external drives seems like they are internal. So if faster is bettter, then firewire wins.

You did not answer the question.

Here’s the answer:

Firewire is way faster than USB 2.0.

Firewire is a standard which is actually not going to be going away because there is a strong need for faster ways to transfer than USB 2.0.

Firewire also has the ability to power an external drive – unlike eSATA. For portable uses, Firewire is the best way to go.

Yes, USB is universal. But it is SLOW as molasses. Perhaps PC users don’t know any better and have learned to live with slow computers.

Mac users know a lot better how much faster firewire is. So long as firewire exists on Macs – and I don’t see where it will go away – then firewire will exist.

If anything, Apple has contributed to the continued existence of firewire. For example, users clamored for Firewire 800 on the Macbook Pro 15″ models. Apple added it with subsequent generations.

Apple lead the industry into making USB universal.

Where Apple goes, the rest of the PC industry follows.

The video response took some of the words out of my fingers. I’ve had my PowerBook for well over a year and it has an 800 and 400 port on it. My external drives, which are enclosures I bought from Macsales.com/Other World Computing, have 400 & 800. My iMac 20″ and smaller LCDs have only a Firewire 400 port. But the 24″ iMac has both. The MacBook Pro laptops have both. Maybe Apple has a vested interest in Firewire for obvious reasons, but so what. My backups over 800 are faster than 400 and USB 2.0, at least from my experience. If I had a choice between USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 or 800, I’d go with Firewire everytime. It doesn’t have the overhead of USB or limitations on number of devices. I think adding more devices probably degrades performance also. USB is convenient since it uses the same port design for 1.1 or 2.0, while a 400 port is different from an 800 connector. Maybe it’s cheaper for the PC makers and such to throw a USB port in there and make people believe they don’t want more options like FIrewire. I understand you’re argument and you’re mostly correct. It’s just that convenience and what’s available doesn’t always equate to what’s best.

This is an old article I quickly Googled, but gets to the point.
http://www.macworld.com/2003/09/reviews/250gbfirewire800drives/

My fondly remembered TechTV friends.
http://www.g4tv.com/techtvvault/features/39129/USB_20_Versus_FireWire.html

Dude, that’s just wrong. On paper, the eSata is something like 4x times faster than FW 800, but in real life they are about equal.
MacWorld did a comparison chart (May 2007). Basic FW 400 is over twice as fast as USB 2.0, and remember, in the Mac—-world, we can boot from external drives. Booting an Intel Mac from USB just doesn’t work. FW 800 is 3x faster than USB 2.0. If you are doing video, and lets face it, on a Mac, you need reliable speed. Video on my PC is painful and you know it.
My 24 inch Intel Core 2 Duo has FW 800, and I find it almost twice as fast as my FW 400 (YRMV), but I know for sure that USB 2.0 is just way too slow for my big video transfers. USB 2 is a consumer interface (Costco & Circuit City). That’s why it is on your Sony HDR SR1. Ever try to buy a FW drive at a box store? Your average PC user doesn’t even know what it is.
We see Apple dropped FW on the iPods because it became such a huge consumer success and they wanted to cut costs. They won’t be dropping Firewire on the Pro Macs any time soon, because no video or sound pro would suffer the quirks of sustained USB 2 transfers. A 10 minute transfer or a 30 minute transfer? That’s one comparison between USB2 and FW800. eSata looks good, but no real world gains against FW800. I wouldn’t call it yet. You are talking about an interface driven and supported by media pros. Firewire die? I don’t think so.

I have 3 3.5-inch external drive boxes with combo Firewire 400 and USB 2, but I only use the Firewire connections to my Powerbook.

One, I like the convenience: a single Firewire cable versus 3 USB hi-speed cables. Two, while doing large file transfers (backups, for example) are about equal in speed according to LaCie’s Silverkeeper utility, Firewire seems smoother in daily use (probably because it doesn’t use as much CPU overhead).

Caveats: my external boxes use Oxford chipsets. I had boxes before with Prolific chips and those really suck. Also, I have an additional 2 2.5-inch external hard drives, and those are bus-powered USB 2 only, which I prefer on the road for convenience.

First, USB 2 isn’t always 480Mbps, just like FW400 isn’t always 400Mbps

With US2, you get USB 1.X modes, then in all but Burst Mode, your speed is hard-locked to 192Mbps. That’s not slow mind you, but if anyone thinks that all USB 2 data connections are 192Mbps, they’re kind of wrong.

FW400 has 3 modes: 100/200/400Mbps.

Obviously with both technologies, those are theoretical maxes. There’s overhead that degrades those speeds somewhat, at least at the highest ends. However, all USB transactions have to be arbitrated and controlled by the CPU, whereas Firewire does not have that requirement. This is an important difference, especially for Video and Sound. (There’s been talk of fixing this in USB, but i’d not heard of it progressing to real product.)

So to use any USB device with another USB device, you have to have a (separate) computer, whereas a Firewire Camera can talk to a Firewire Hard Drive, no computer required.

The idea that the success/failure of one requires the success/failure of the other sounds like Chris has been drinking from the “There can be only one” Flavor-Aid a bit too much. And yeah, this wins for “Most misleading post title of the week”.

USB? LOLLL!!!

I think usb was created for the winblow market; the ones that are too dumb or too cheap to understand what’s really good. Companies use it because statiscally speaking, there are more idiot consumers than smart ones and THAT’S really good for business.

Firewire eats USB anytime of the day.

Don’t forget, Universal is almost always lowest common denominator, not best. Really useful to have a LCD connector around for interchange, migration, the occasional job, etc. But you don’t want to depend on it.

FW 400 and 800 are both faster than USB 2 if you have a drive that is beyond the commodity drives that most people get. With these it does make no difference between FW and USB. However, the specs on even commodity drives is likely to outpace USB 2 within 12-18 months, so we’ll need a USB 3 or FW to take advantage of these.

FW is far more reliable for real-time media transfer and creating cheap fast networks for distributed processing (tomorrows’ menu is likely to be modular systems that are enhanced by adding another cube to the pile.)

Something new may (and probably will) come along to replace both USB and FW, but it ain’t here yet.

Let’s see, my iPod, EyeTV, external hard drives and Compact Flash card reader all use FireWire. My memory stick uses USB. I’m happy staying with FW.

USB is commonly available but it is slow. Also, on windows machines it has been unreliable. A lot of people complain about not seeing USB flash drives when they are plugged in or they see them come up with wrong names.

I would add that I am seeing more and more FW ports on new high end PCs. Also, I think FW was adopted as part of the HDTV interface. Could be wrong on that.

USB drivers on PPC Macs are very slow. The speed of USB 2.0 on an Intel based Mac is close to what PC users have been used to for quite some time. Nevertheless, USB requires CPU intervention for every transfer and Firewire can be done by the subsystems. It’s designed to be isochronos, so time critical transfers can take place. Anyway a single high performance hard drive and push data faster than FireWire 400 supports, so for systems supporting it, it’s best to use FW 800. RAID arrays should use FW800 or eSATA for best performance. As for more mundane/less tasking devices, USB 2.0 is OK an cheaper and better supported cross-platform. Regarding points mentioned above, FireWire 400 supports more power, so is better for mobile external hard drives. Both PPC and Intel based Macs can boot with a FW Hard drive, but only the Intel models can also boot over a USB 2.0 connection (due to the better driver and Intel designed motherboard) As for FireWire going away, you may be suprised to see it used in Hi Fidelity video systems, such as Pioneer Elite. Some automotive manufacturers have been looking into using this Apple designed technology.

@James Katt, what is with Apple users? You guys cannot resist a dig at the PC community, can you? This topic is not even about PC vs. Mac. I have a used Apple with me and it is TOTALLY crashproof – I have to give this to Apple. Then it struck me that I was not doing anything significant on the Mac. Any computer that does nothing has to be crashproof ! Coming from the pc world with tons of apps and hardware choices, the mac world is strangely bereft. No wonder Mac afficionados take out their frustration on the pc community !

This is probably the worst article I have read on the subject. I have 2 external hard drives that are in enclosures that will operate on either USB2 or Firewire. I have run large data transfers in both modes, and Firewire 400 is definitely faster. I also have a Logitech USB game maouse and it WILL NOT work from a USB hub. It has to be directly connected to the USB port. Logitech says it is because of the power consumption. USB can’t handle it. I haven’t tried eSATA yet, but I don’t expect any great performance gains, and you certainly can’t daisy chain devices. Firewire is the way to go for externals

Trying video editing with a USB drive. Its unbearable. There is a reason nearly everything in the pro app world uses firewire. Audio Mixers, Hard Drive arrays, video capture, camcorders, etc. Personally I feel if your camera didn’t come with firewire, perhaps its not that great of a camera. Im willing to bet that 99% of the products at NAB use firewire. I hardly think its dying.