FireWire: over a billion ports served
By Nilay Patel 
posted April 9th 2008 9:04PM
posted April 9th 2008 9:04PM
Alright, so we've harshed a little bit on FireWire recently, but we've got to stop and give the venerable interconnect some love: the 1394 Trade Association says that there are now over a billion FireWire ports out there. That's quite an accomplishment, even if we're not so sure that the group's claim that "every 1394-equipped device sold now has 1 billion opportunities to connect" is the most accurate or useful way of measuring the success of the technology. Even still, growth is always a good thing, and with an estimated 15 percent expansion rate in existing markets and some new applications like in-car networking showing potential, it looks like FireWire is set to hold its own against USB and eSATA for a while longer.
I do believe I have been out-punned. Bravo sir.
If you ever try phrasing your apology like the last dude suggested, you're going to get a really weird look.
..and then people will laugh at you, which is good.
@yevon
Don't you mean "... under the influenza..."?
Love or hate Firewire...FW 800 kicks the living shit out of USB 2 and until USB 3 comes out I will love, and pet and call my external SATA FW800 drive George.
FW800 is so pointless now. If you're a serious about fast external storage you'll use eSATA. Even on a laptop (via Cardbus slot).
If speed is unimportant, there's USB 2.0. And a lot of external disks are NAS boxes now featuring 1gbps Ethernet (faster than even FW800).
FW400 is completely useless except for DV cameras.
Contrast all that with eSATA, which is 3gbps. Or USB, which is used for hundreds of types of devices from flash disks, to mice, to cell phones, to Harmony remotes, etc.
Firewire in general is a relic of the old Apple. I can't wait till it goes away for good and joins the ranks of Nubus, RGsB monitors, one-button mice, and ADC connectors.
Firewire group:
-----
thanks for not designing the connector symmetrical. Because you were more expensive to manufacturers making millions of mainboards and whatnot, you were stuck in predominantly video niches where your superiority could shine.
eSATA group:
Thanks for improving the connectors in your externalness, please integrate power if you haven't already.
USB: thanks for the good times, now and in the future. No thanks for your "is it the right way up" symmetrical "A" connector. Thanks to your relative cheapness versus firewire at the time, you were deployed en masse.
The "1 billion ports" thing would be impressive, except that every motherboard with a firewire port generally has 4 USB ports...
not including laptops, which often have 4 USB and no firewire, like mine...
The difference is most firewire devices have internal hubs and can be daisy-chained so you only need one port. It's a shame the superior standard is so underused.
But is that the result of patents or what??
If firewire got screwed over by patents, it's just another (one of millions) of cases where our brain dead patent system is holding technology back.
I love firewire, I have various Firewire DVD-RW drives which I use, I can plug them into any of my PCs and notebooks. Very important on notebooks since they don't have that many USB ports, and lower CPU utilization over firewire. I also use a Sony VGP-XL1B firewire changer, 200 disk DVD-RW changer, that doesn't work over USB. You can daisy chain. I can gather all my firewire drives together and simultaneously burn to all of them.. all from a single firewire connector on my notebook. I have a couple firewire HDD enclosures. Again, performance is better than over USB2.0. Finally, one of the best features is whenever I install XP on a machine, the first thing I do is network it over Firewire to a notebook bridged between firewire and Ethernet. I can then download all the appropriate drivers to get the video and network card running without all the hassle of burning it on a CD or flash drive, etc. On a Mac, I can mount a the Mac like an external HDD over firewire. If only there had been no firewire licensing fee from the beginning, it would have kicked USB all over the place just because of daisy chaining, and shared performance over a single link.
Yup - Firewire is so much faster and more reliable than USB fr data transfer that the only reason people don't rate it is because they haven't tried it. It's sort of a catch 22 situation. My scanner, 2 external hard drives, CF card reader and video camera all connect via firewire 400 and they beat using USB2 any day. Connect two PCs via firewire and you have instant super-fast networking. Connect a video camera and you have an instant very high quality webcam. You'd have to be a fool to use USB in preference.
Amy
Seems you got quite the budget to buy all your devices in IEEE1394 versions, unfortunately the US economy is sagging so it might be too late for people to engage in such frivolities.
But I agree, it's a fine interface and deserves credit.
I use Firewire often for video transfers, and it works wonderfully.
Can USB sustain the speed required for DV transfers?
I think USB has the Bandwidth, since DV is about 30mbps (straight DV, not one of the higher bandwidth versions). The problem with USB though is that it doesn't have the arbitration and control protocols (at least initially, don't know about now) to ensure that your FW device can continue to stream at speed since it's physically coming off a tape spinning at a certain speed, so it doesn't appreciate interruptions. USB devices don't do such a great job so lets say you needed to transfer some files from a USB drive attached to the same root hub, it can cause an interruption from other devices on the chain. Not an issue if you have enough overhead and some buffering, but that's why they throw 480mbps at you, to minimize the impact of these interruptions. That works as long as you have lots of overhead, but once you start transferring large amounts of data, it degrades quickly. If you transferred from say a USB camcorder to a USB hdd, it passes all the way to the computer, and back out to the HDD. Firewire on the other hand can actually transfer from a Firewire camcorder to another Firewire VCR or HDD attached to the same cable directly without passing through the PC since it has multiple "Masters" meaning the Camcorder can talk directly to the VCR. It's really quite elegant compared to USB which like it's name, was meant to be a really fast shared Serial port.
The reason firewire is so fast is because it utilizes DMA and doesn't need all the CPU cycles to shuffle the data like USB does.
Of course that also makes it easy to hack your computer when it's used as a network interface, but since people only use that on private LAN they would have to be hacking themselves.
Its the first time i write in Engadget i had to why do people compare Firewire with USB2. Well maybe because USB2 isnt even faster that Firewire and firewire was made to compete with USB 1
So compare like this
Firewire vs USB= Firewire Wins
Firewire vs USB2= Tie
Firewire 800 vs USB2= Firewire 800
I remeber say the Powermac 700mhz that had a firewire and usb and they had to make the Ipod firewire because if you tried to copy 5 gigs to a ipod on usb it would take 2 weeks lol.
i must say congratulations and kudos.
i love firewire – 400 performs better than usb 2 for me, and when i hook up my external using 800 it screams through the gigabytes like nobody's business.
@tekdroid: i am totally with you about the connectors. it is often frustrating trying to plug in usb when you can't see it (in the dark, around the back of a computer). the 800 plug (and to a certain extent, 400) is much easier for me to feel.
I don't agree with the connectors statement, I find USB easier to plug in 'blind' than firewire.
nobody i mean nobody can say it easy to plug a usb.
FireWire forever.
Yeah, but how many of those ports are actually getting USED.
Most people probably stick with the (infinitely) more popular USB, I'd think.
anybody that edits video for the past 7 years thats has a dv camara.
Why is everyone trying to argue over whether Firewire or USB is better? They are actually quite different beasts. Heres a few quick points about the two regarding large data transfers:
Firewire is great for things like DV transfer, because it can guarantee the high bandwidth, and not have to operate in 'chunks'.
USB is great for things like bulk data transfer, that can be buffered up and transfered in chunks, and is ok to be interrupted (delayed). I.e. hard drives.
USB also has many other transfer modes that each have different capabilities. E.g. low bandwidth, guaranteed low latency transfers for mice.
So stop pretending they are the same thing just at different speeds...
FireWire: over a billion ports served, eight of the used - ever.
used to get a firewire cable when u bought an ipod, my old packard bell had front firewire port, and it was just noticeably faster then usb 2.0, also the connector shape ruled a lot better than usb imo
I wonder how many they are counting are on PS2's (the old style). They were really under utilized. The only game I can remember that used them was Unreal.
There are over six billion people on the planet, so you have over six billion chances to hook up.... and yet many people are still home alone each night.
You can help one of these lonely people by hooking up with one of them tonight. It doesn't matter that they are not what you want to hook up with. All that matters is that you hook up.
A little sympathy hook-up will make you feel better about yourself. And it will do wonders for them!
(I got dibs on the hot chick!)
I like the new look - pity they didn't put the effort into fixing the comment system... because it still sucks majorly.
Moving on.
Just because there are a lot of ports claimed to be out there (and most of them are either iLink or on Macs) doesn't actually mean a win.
How many of them are actually used?
When this topic comes up, inevitably DV comes into the discussion - except that use of Firewire for DV was kind of a short term abberation. You wanted to edit using your camcorder as storage because a couple of gigs back then was major change. Now, everyone starts at 80GB so an entire tape easily fits on the computer and using a bulk copy of the digital data then editing locally makes more sense.
Firewire may indeed be the better technical standard, but that's not enough to be the winner. Apple dropped the ball at the wrong time and FW has never recovered.
USB, on the other hand has evolved to the point where it handles all but the truely fringe needs quite well. It's not that hard to come up with some feature YOU personally feel is essential (like ethana's odd list), but are these things the average consumer needs?
True, USB2 isn't as fast as FW800, but MOST people don't do anything on their computer that needs 100MB/s access to anything - not even their hard drives. Most people's access speed is limited by their Internet access speed or maybe their DVD drive data speed... we're talking 10MB/s tops.
By the time something shows up that honestly needs that speed, USB3 will be here to fill in the gap.
Looking around my own systems, I have three PCs (4 FW/13 USB), a laptop (0 FW/2 USB), a UMPC (0 FW/2 USB) and two Macs (2 FW/7 USB) and the ONLY time I've ever used FW is on my old iBook because it won't boot off USB. On the other hand, every USB port is filled and there are several USB hubs in the mix.
Almost all pocket and external drives sold are USB2 only. Same with webcams, keyboard, mice, TV tuners...
Nothing I see is sold with Firewire, except for the occasional 3.5" external hard drive.
Count ports all you want. Just walking through any Best Buy will show you who's won.
The main trouble with firewire is the fact that it is not rare to burn the port.
I'm a fan of firewire's fast transfer rates but what get's me is all the different connections for it 4pin/6pin/9pin WTF!! one standard please!! also i think the 4pin connections on most devices are terrible i've had plenty of instances where the wire was moved slightly and screwed up what i was doing and made my system crash. and i ran into a problem with my hv20 camera not even connecting to my laptop but it worked on other systems (granted i'm sure it's a compatability issue but still).