Dont trust anyone from guitar centerdman5000 wrote:hmm... just relaying what i heard at guitar center and from a homie that films and edits video(which is a huge firewire using field)... guess you cant always go by the numbers tho//// but anyway if firewire is actually faster- why are less and less products using it and why isnt it on newer computers?LoneStar wrote:That's wrong. If you compare the numbers, you'll see that Firewire 400 is 400 Mbit/s and USB 2.0 is 480 Mbit/s, yes. BUT the practical throughput of firewire is higher because of the protocol. USB 2.0 isn't really suited for realtime transfer compared, that's why. Not to speak of Firewire 800.dman5000 wrote:usb 2.0 is faster than firewire.
But of course you're right to say firewire support is generally declining. But then, what stops you from putting a firewire card into your pc? Oh right, the not-present expansion capabilities of macs, especially the laptops
The reason you get better throughput with firewire than USB2.0 is to do with the way packets are sent -
Firewire basically says "OK now I'm gunna send you a bunch of packets of information, get ready, they will be like "this". "
USB2.0 sends header & tail information with every individual packet identifying it - which takes up a certain % of the bandwidth and also means that every packet received has to be processed to extract the data.
Firewire's been dropped because USB3.0 has been supposed to be coming for the past year or so.. unfortunately it isnt here yet STILL!..
Also despite firewire having faster actual useable data transfer rates, USB won in terms of market share... USB is the word everyone knows and uses