FireWire and Blu-ray are a good combination, says 1394 Trade Association
Though it sounds a bit like Steve Jobs saying that Macs are good, or Steve Ballmer saying Windows Vista kicks ass, the 1394 Trade Association has piped up and said that the FireWire standard and Blu-ray disc technology are a good combination.
The not-for-profit 1394 Trade Association supports the development of the IEEE 1394 (FireWire) standard, and has highlighted new Blu-ray peripherals incorporating a FireWire interface, from the likes of Samsung, Sharp, LaCie, and Other World Computing.
FireWire connections are found on most Mac desktop and notebook computers, though some use the slower FireWire 400 port, which has an inferior speed to USB2. They're not so commonly found on PCs.
I don't think this statement is taken to mean that the 1394 Trade Association specifically supports Blu-ray. There's no technical reason why a Firewire-equipped HD DVD drive couldn't connect to a Mac. Neither format can yet be used in OS X to directly play back high definition discs.
That's not strictly true about USB2, real world examples put FireWire 400 as the faster interface.
USB 2.0 is a 480 Mbps interface and FireWire is a 400 Mbps interface, how can FireWire be faster? It's down to architecture.
The throughput numbers would lead you to believe that USB 2.0 provides better performance. But, differences in the architecture of the two interfaces have a huge impact on the actual sustained "real world" throughput. And for those seeking high-performance, sustained throughput is what it's all about (reading and writing files to an external hard drive for example).
FireWire, built from the ground up for speed, uses a "Peer-to-Peer" architecture in which the peripherals are intelligent and can negotiate bus conflicts to determine which device can best control a data transfer
USB 2.0 uses a "Master-Slave" architecture in which the computer handles all arbitration functions and dictates data flow to, from and between the attached peripherals (adding additional system overhead and resulting in slower, less-efficient data flow control)
Read and write tests to the same IDE hard drive connected using FireWire and then USB 2.0 show:
Read Test:
5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 33% faster than USB 2.0
160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 70% faster than USB 2.0
Write Test:
5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 16% faster than USB 2.0
160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 48% faster than USB 2.0
So FireWire is still king, but then FireWire 2 which is a 800 Mbps arhitecture and available on Macs now, kicks the arse out of both of them.
Posted by: Jordy | May 4, 2007 9:14 AM