Although there's a Macbook Pro in my near future, I'm currently using an iMac G4. All the USB devices I've used were slow, slow, slow.
Yeah... USB2 performance of PowerPC Macs was pretty dire. I remember Ars Technica did a technical analysis of what the problem was. Even in Linux, USB2 transfers were terribly slow on PPC machines and Ars went to great lengths to prove it was a hardware implementation problem rather than anything driver-related.
Agreed. The few speed comparisons I was able to find all showed sustained transfers via FW400 to be 50-100% faster than USB 2.0.
The neat thing about Firewire is that it's much more intelligent than USB (1.1 or 2.0). USB requires that a device be acting as the 'host' to control transfers - USB devices can't just talk to eachother without the intervention of some kind of CPU. However, Firewire's got the smarts to perform transfers independently of any host.
Plus, Firewire can provide more amps via its interface than USB2 can. My external 2.5" hard disk has both USB2 and Firewire 400. Using Firewire, the drive's transfer and power all comes from the one Firewire cable. Using USB2, I either have to conenct it to two USB ports using the special cable (one for data+power, one to supplement the power) or use an external AC adapter.
Oh, and many Firewire devices have built-in pass-through conenctors, so it's a snap to daisy-chain them together without faffing about with a hub.
Firewire 800's (IEEE 1394b) not quite as ubiquitous as FW400 (IEEE 1394b), sadly. However, I imagine that the upcoming FW1600 (you guessed it, IEE1394c) could have some interesting uses!
