New Mac user: Firewire 400 VS Firewire 800 - is there a real difference?

-Josh- said:

So, to my understandings. Firewire is lke USB only faster, and Mac exclusive. Correct? So firewire 400 and firewire 800 is essentially the same accept it's twice as fast?

But firewire 400 is faster than any USB regardless?

Do I understand this corrently?

Thanks for your time guys, new switcher here!

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Mostly correct. Both are hot-pluggable device cables, not quite Mac-exclusive though, though I know what you would think that. Firewire is a Apple-'owned' (they headed the Firewire consortium) and developed. It is also far more expensive since Apple receives royalties on it. Which is why it's usually not so common in the wintel world

Firewire is also far far faster than USB. The number following the Firewire ###, is the speed in megabits, so 400 is 'twice' as fast as 800.

google 'wiki firewire'

Josh, might I suggest you take a look at these pages?

http://www.apple.com/getamac/

http://www.apple.com/getamac/movetomac/

400Mbit/s = 50MB/s
800Mbit/s = 100MB/s
(although with either one, throughput will be lower due to overhead)

Single SATA hard disks are now approaching (and even in some cases occasionally passing) the 100MB/s barrier. So they can saturate a FW800 link.

Some external drives actually have two disks in a striped/RAID 0 configuration. Such a configuration should be even faster.

My own experience is that I rarely get real world transfer speeds greater than 39MB/s out of a FireWire 400 port. Speeds of 80-85MB/s are relatively common over FW800. So if you're moving large amounts of data, on modern disks, yes, the difference is HUGE.

I have a first-generation Core Duo MBP. My only two issues with it at this point are 1) that it cannot be upgraded past 2GB RAM and 2) that it lacks a FireWire 800 port.

Incidentally, FireWire 400 is not uncommon in the Windows world. My last three Windows PCs, all cheap premade ones, all had it. But I've never seen FireWire 800 on a store-buyable PC by anyone other than Apple.

sammich said:

Firewire is also far far faster than USB. The number following the Firewire ###, is the speed in megabits, so 400 is 'twice' as fast as 800.

google 'wiki firewire'

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Actually USB 2 is faster than Firewire 400. USB 2 = 480Mbps and 400 = 400Mbps.
Firewire 800 now is a different story.

rychencop said:

Actually USB 2 is faster than Firewire 400. USB 2 = 480Mbps and 400 = 400Mbps.
Firewire 800 now is a different story.

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Numerically USB 2.0 is faster than firewire 400, the in the real world is it the case?

rychencop said:

Actually USB 2 is faster than Firewire 400. USB 2 = 480Mbps and 400 = 400Mbps.
Firewire 800 now is a different story.

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USB2 has a higher theoretical maximum than FW400 but in reality, due to the way it handles data, FW400 is significantly quicker. Particularly in the cases of large data transfers.

How do you make an ext HD into a firewire one?

I have a Seagate External HD.
I had purchased the drive, and bought an enclosure. This is USB 2.0

Now, can I just buy a different enclosure that is Firewire and place the drive into that, making it a Firewire drive?

Is it that simple? Is there such an enclosure?

Thanks.

zub3qin said:

I have a Seagate External HD.
I had purchased the drive, and bought an enclosure. This is USB 2.0

Now, can I just buy a different enclosure that is Firewire and place the drive into that, making it a Firewire drive?

Is it that simple? Is there such an enclosure?

Thanks.

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Yes. It's that simple. There is such an enclosure. You just have to be careful to get the correct harddrive interface (PATA vs. SATA).

So is it possible to get a firewire 800 hub and add more connection into it and getting greater speed - ie like usb2 you can buy hubs for it and make up to 7 other usb2 connections ?

cleverbloke said:

So is it possible to get a firewire 800 hub and add more connection into it and getting greater speed - ie like usb2 you can buy hubs for it and make up to 7 other usb2 connections ?

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You can buy firewire 800 hubs, just google it. But as for it speeding it up, no. The hub simply acts as a splitter for the main cable. With a hub you can attach like 8 devices but they will ALL share the speed of the cable that connects the hub to the computer. All the hub does is allow you to connect more devices at the same time.

sammich said:

You can buy firewire 800 hubs, just google it. But as for it speeding it up, no. The hub simply acts as a splitter for the main cable. With a hub you can attach like 8 devices but they will ALL share the speed of the cable that connects the hub to the computer. All the hub does is allow you to connect more devices at the same time.

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Thanks, makess sense now i remember i had my external hard drive connected to my 4 usb2 hub and wondered why it was so slow transfering to my laptop the minute i conneted the external to the usb2 hub on the laptop it was flying , so getting a hub firewire isnt really an option if you want speed nor usb2 for that matter , funny how they never put that on the packaging when your buying it lol

sammich said:

You can buy firewire 800 hubs, just google it. But as for it speeding it up, no. The hub simply acts as a splitter for the main cable. With a hub you can attach like 8 devices but they will ALL share the speed of the cable that connects the hub to the computer. All the hub does is allow you to connect more devices at the same time.

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Yep, and the beauty of Firewire -- daisy chain! Most devices will have 2 firewire ports, so you can connect devices like this:

Computer -> Ext. HDD 1 -> Ext. HDD 2 -> DV Camcorder

With just one cable coming out of the computer! That's also why you don't see like 10, 12 or 1000 USB ports on a computer.

(Well, there's a limit number of 63 devices connected. I think that's more than enough, no?)

Firewire also allows device to device communication without the aid of the host computer's processor. Beauty.

Hm... I just noticed something when I was just browsing around...

Microsoft Windows XP supports 1394a and 1394b, but as of Service Pack 2, every FireWire device will only run at S100 (100 Mbit/second) speed. A hotfix download is available from Microsoft which, with a simple registry modification, enables devices rated at S400 or S800 speeds to operate at their rated speed.

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(Quoted from Wikipedia)

Why, Microsoft... why you?

Fyi

Thursday, September 20, 2007
IDF: USB3.0 Specs Expected in H1 2008 — Cormac @ 01:00 Discuss this

Intel Corporation along with HP, Microsoft Corporation, NEC Corporation, NXP Semiconductors and Texas Instruments Incorporated have formed the USB 3.0 Promoter Group to create a faster personal USB interconnect that can deliver over 10 times the speed of today's connection. The technology will target fast sync-and-go transfer applications in the PC, consumer and mobile segments that are necessary as digital media become ubiquitous and file sizes increase up to and beyond 25 Gigabytes.

USB 3.0 will create a backward-compatible standard with the same ease-of-use and plug and play capabilities of previous USB technologies. Targeting over 10x performance increase, the technology will draw from the same architecture of wired USB. In addition, the USB 3.0 specification will be optimized for low power and improved protocol efficiency. USB 3.0 ports and cabling will be designed to enable backward compatibility as well as future-proofing for optical capabilities.

Intel formed the USB 3.0 Promoter Group with the understanding that the USB-IF would act as the trade association for the USB 3.0 specification. A completed USB 3.0 specification is expected by the first half of 2008. USB 3.0 implementations will initially be in the form of discrete silicon.

Source: Intel Corporation

OllyW said:

I did a little test a while ago, backing up my iTunes library which at the time was just over 80GB with about 18,000 files.

Backing up to a USB 2.0 HDD lasted over 2 hours.

The same transfer over FW400 was about 50 minutes and only 22 minutes with FW800.

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Definitely. I transfer large video files constantly at work, and FW400 is definitely faster than USB. Unfortunately, we haven't upgraded all our stuff to FW800 yet.

woodsea said:

USB 3.0 will create a backward-compatible standard with the same ease-of-use and plug and play capabilities of previous USB technologies. Targeting over 10x performance increase, the technology will draw from the same architecture of wired USB.

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Translation:
It will still not be as good as Firewire for hard drive usage.

sammich said:

It is also far more expensive since Apple receives royalties on it. Which is why it's usually not so common in the wintel world

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Not exactly. Apple receives approximately 25 cents royalty on Firewire devices.
It's more expensive because it requires a smart Firewire controller to manage the data communications on the Firewire bus, whereas USB uses very inexpensive 'dumb' electronics and pushes the work of controlling the bus onto the computer's CPU.

external hard drive connected to my 4 usb2 hub and wondered why it was so slow transfering to my laptop the minute i conneted the external to the usb2 hub on the laptop it was flying , so getting a hub firewire isnt really an option if you want speed

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Red herring. Unless the hub is defective, plugging a FW or USB device into a hub should be exactly the same speed as plugging it into the machine. The slowdown the previous poster mention happens only when there is more than one device contending for bandwidth on the hub simultaneously.

Let's also not forget that Firewire carries 3 times the amperage of USB 2.0 on the 6pin line (I'm not sure how much power Firewire800 carries) which makes it ideal for external bus powered drives. It can also deliver 6 times the voltage and 12 times the wattage. All in all, it is a superior standard, faster throughput, higher amperage, and daisy chaining.