Who uses firewire ports?

[cadkiller]

Group;

Just curious if anyone is using a firewire port.
If so what are you using it for?
How fast is the port and is it much better than USB?

[Andre Baros]

Firewire 400 is much faster than USB 1.0 and used by a lot of Video/Digital Camera's, which is what we use it for.
USB 2.0 is faster than Firewire 400 and replaced Firewire on most external drives, etc.
Firewire 800 is faster than USB 2.0 and used on devices that need really high speed.

USB can carry power, but usually doesn't, Firewire always does, I think. Firewire also has a higher limit on the number of daisy chained devices... though I don't know many peripherals which support that.

[hand471037]

I use firewire, but that's because I've got an old Firewire iPod, and own some Macs at home. They seem to make more use of it. For example, via Firewire, I can boot one of my Macs off an external DVD burner drive without having to do anything but plug it in and put a DVD in there the computer could boot from... very handy when switching to 10.4 from 10.3 on a computer I took the CD-ROM drive out of to make more room for the RAID drives in it...

Otherwise I haven't really noticed a difference between USB2 and Firewire. But I don't do video, so...

[aaronrumple]

I use Firewire for backup to external hard drive. Zoom Zoom.

[Jordan Truesdell]

Firewire400 is faster than USB2.0 in real life, though only by 10 ro 20%. Firewire800 smokes USB2.0, but there are relatively few applications that require that kind of speed (a single 7200rpm hard drive can't fill an 800Mb pipe).

I don't use it for work - I have a server and a Gb ethernet network, but my total capacity is fairly low (40GB drive). At home, however, I'm archiving my DVDs (bit by bit - I have about 300, and I've probably ripped about 80) and pulling standard and HD off of my hacked TiVo. For that, I've got an 8 bay FireWire 400 tower hooked to a dedicated server - I'm just shy of 2TB of storage space overall. I've still got space left, but with the new crop of 500GB drives out, I can expand to 4TB if I need to. Too much to put in a single PC case, but it fits nicely in a FW box.

As for throughput, I can get about 220Mb/s maximum throughput on the system (tower to server across Gb ethernet and into my laptop). The bottleneck is the FW, but I'm waaaay to cheap to go get a FW800 solution.

[Robert.Hall]

Way better than using ps2!!!

[powermarc]

USB can carry power, but usually doesn't, Firewire always does, I think. Firewire also has a higher limit on the number of daisy chained devices... though I don't know many peripherals which support that.
To amplify on that, FireWire 6-pin connectors can carry 30VDC up to 45W over the cable, so anything that has moderate power requirements can run straight off of this. The cables with the mini-4 pin end (like the kind you use to hook up your MiniDV camera) do not carry power. USB only carries power if the cable is attached to a powered hub. USB supplies 5VDC with a powered connector.

Speaking of that, USB always requires a hub (whether it's actually inside your computer and you have 4-8 ports built-in or you have a separate box outside). So, it's always device-cable-hub for USB up to 127 devices. You can attach hubs (which count as a device) to another hub to hook up a large number of USB stuff, up to five levels of hierarchy.

FireWire can be device-cable-device-cable-device-cable, etc. up to 63 devices in a single chain.