Originally posted by G4scott
USB sucks. It's good for mice, keyboards, and other small bandwidth devices. USB 2 is for really fast mice and keyboards
USB is a serial bus... It may be cheaper to put into a device, but then for some devices like hard drives, you need a power supply where firewire wouldn't. Hopefully Firewire2 will mop the floors with USB2...
Another reason why USB sucks: It's made by intel
Actually, the problem that I have with USB, is that it's like hooking up a hard drive with an old serial port, where firewire most resembles scsi.
Originally posted by dongmin
I'm starting to lose confidence in the future of firewire. Firewire hasn't made anywhere near the kinds of market strides I expected and hoped it would.
Originally posted by dongmin
I'm starting to lose confidence in the future of firewire. Firewire hasn't made anywhere near the kinds of market strides I expected and hoped it would.
1) Apple totes FireWire's support of hot-plugging, but hot-plugging FireWire devices is extremely risky for the device because the design of the plug allows for shorts to happen on the connection if the plug is not inserted perfectly. You run the risk of damaging your video camera, your audio interface, or your 1 TB hard drive containing your life's work.
2) Apple totes FireWire's support of daisy chaining devices, but this concept is flawed and impractical for many power-hungry FireWire devices. The fact is that performance suffers on the host device in particular, and while this may not be a problem for hard drives where only things like read/write speed are affected, it certainly is an issue when, for example, your audio interface suddenly can't handle the buffer at typical sample rates.
3) FireWire interfaces are notorious for failing when multiple devices are plugged in. Devices receive fluctuating streams of power and may not maintain an adequate signal, especially when one device is switched off or another device plugged into the interface is switched on. It's almost as if all the FireWire ports are acting as one, and in order to do anything simple such as switching off a device, you absolutely must turn off the computer and switch off every device, lest you spoil the other devices with power surges, etc.
Such problems exist for devices which conform to FireWire standardthat is to say, the problems are not caused by the devices but rather by FireWire's inferior engineering.
I have never heard of this ever happening. Do you have a source?
Are you trying to convince me that USB is better in this regard?
Again, I haven't heard of this. Source?
For one thing, it's weird to resurrect such a ridiculously old thread (6 years! Wow, that might be a record!). For another thing, you fail to mention USB's faults such as sustained data rate.
And this is your first and only post so far on the boards? I think I smell troll...
...
I was in the studio recently with an engineer using a G4, and the problem associated with plugging multiple devices into the same interface occurred when he had multiple FireWire hard drives plugged. The 500GB MyBook drive was not receiving power from the machine; he had to reboot his computer, which solved the problem. ...
Citing problems that recording studio was having with a G4...?
That's ancient history...
Considering that FireWire was developed in '95, you'd think that almost a decade later with the G4 they would have had such problems solved.
I work as IT for a very big university in northern california. Out of all the MacPro motherboards (and the iMacs we have for the labs), we never had USB fail on them, only firewire.