Firewire vs USB external hard drives

O

obelix

New member
Ok.. this question regards speed and external hard drives. I have a firewire port and two high speed USB ports on my laptop. I want to buy an external hard drive for capturing video to my Dell Inspiron 700M but I am not sure if i should buy one with usb interface or firewire interface. Which of the alternatives will give me best transfer spee? It seems that firewire is the fastest according to these articles

http://www.usb-ware.com/firewire-vs-usb.htm
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_zdpcm/is_200302/ai_ziff36161#continue

but I have read some posts in this forum that suggests the opposite... Will both caputring from my dvx100 and writing to an external hard drive be slow considering that i only have ONE firewire controller?

Thanks for your help.

Jorgen - the Norwegian :)
 
Welcome to DVXuser Jorgen!

I just have dual interface hard drives :-) ..but that doens't answer your question.

I have captured with both Firewire and USB2 without trouble, however 99% of the time I run them on the USB2 connection. - in fact I have 2 hard drives, both connected via USB2 through a hub (sharing a connetion with a web cam, and a printer, contour shuttle and PDA dock through a 2nd hub, all in the main hub) to one port on my laptop, and it works fine. - The other port is for the mouse alone. [nice resource sharing, huh?]

- Mikko
 
Firewire is *technically* faster in real life situations - but for capturing SD they are both beyond the speed you would need to capture, making it pretty much up to you what to buy/use.
 
I Second Mikko and would go with a dual interface.
I got an external enclosure with both for about 45 dollars off of newegg and bought a 200gb drive
 
I only use the usb 2.0 on my external drive if the computer im using it with doesn't have firewire.
Firewire is so much faster than usb 2.0, especially if you're doing file transfers.
 
Ok, why is everyone saying that FireWire is faster than USB 2.0? FireWire has a transfer rate of 400Mbps, USB 2.0 is 480Mbps. Am I missing something? Unless you're talking about FireWire 800, then that's a different story. What am I missing here?
 
ovjamaica said:
Ok, why is everyone saying that FireWire is faster than USB 2.0? FireWire has a transfer rate of 400Mbps, USB 2.0 is 480Mbps. Am I missing something? Unless you're talking about FireWire 800, then that's a different story. What am I missing here?
Click to expand...

I don't think you're missing anything, as I was under the impression that USB 2.0 was faster than firewire as well.
 
So I can plug my dvx into the firewire port, plug, say, a 160GB iomega external hard drive into the USB2 adapter on my laptop, and just capture through...reliably?

Sounds great.
 
I think the key word is 'sustained' throughput. Firewire 400 is generally considered better than USB 2.0 when it comes to sustained throughput. The first article link that obelix has at the start of this thread answers the question directly. As others have already noted, both are sufficient for DV capture to an external drive.
-Dan
 
USB2 is faster than Firewire...in the specs. But in the hardware? Hmmm....not yet, I think.

Of course, I haven't gne out and bought the latest greatest superduper USB interface cards, either. :)
 
TeleDan said:
I think the key word is 'sustained' throughput. Firewire 400 is generally considered better than USB 2.0 when it comes to sustained throughput. The first article link that obelix has at the start of this thread answers the question directly. As others have already noted, both are sufficient for DV capture to an external drive.
-Dan
Click to expand...

Thanks for pointing that out. I suppose FireWire may be faster in sustained throughput, I just knew the specs of USB 2.0 were faster.

As others have said, this point is really moot anyway. You can capture video to a standard ULTRA ATA drive (which is only 133Mbps) and it's fine. So either one should have enough bandwidth to sustain video capture easily.
 
The reason firewire is faster than usb 2.0 is the way each interface works.

When a firewire device is connected to computer, the device specifies what kind of connection it needs. 50, 100, 200, or 400Mbps and all connections are switched, meaning the total bandwidth will not be split to compromise for more devices. No matter what other device is connected or what is happening, the firewire protocol will guarantee that transfer speed the device originally connected with.

USB 2.0 on the other hand is a hub based technology. reason being, it has to maintain compatibility with the older (and slower) usb 1.1. though it will advertise 480Mbps, it can never reach that unless absolutely NOTHING is happening on the system. this also means that as you plug in more devices, your 480Mbps is split up among your devices.

As for my experiences, I ran xbench on my iMac. My internal SATA/150 drive rated roughly 93/100. The external drive through its firewire connector rated a 40/100. And the same drive through usb 2.0 rated a 15/100.
 
I've heard, although it may actually be the same thing as rpster88's excellent explanation, that Firewire requires less CPU intervention than USB2.0. Ie. USB2.0 requires more CPU resources than Firewire and so may slow down more if the CPU is being used for other tasks at the same time.

But both should still be fast enough for your intended use.
 
On some systems USB2.0 slows down to USB1.1 when the USB keyboard or the mouse is used, as the USB system has to accomodate the slowest device in use.

Firewire works always, USB2.0 can not be relied on, always.
 
WOW.. What a forume. Than you so much for all your answers!! Nice to be part of the Dvx community :)

The conclusion is that I should buy a USB external hard drive then… because it is lot cheaper, at least here in Norway, and it is not slower then a firewire disk – at least not for capturing DV video.. Do you agree?

rpster88 brought up a very interesting fact that kind of answers the second part of my question. Because I only have ONE firewire controller, this means that when I capture video from my camera, this will take up some bandwidth (abut 25Mb/s right?). If I want to write to the external disk, this means that I need another 25Mb/s of bandwidth from the firewire controller.. This means that I need 50Mb/s in total which still is a lot less then what the firewire can handle… Well… is still think I will go for the USB drive, because it is a lot cheaper..

By the way – ericyoung – you are absolutely right.. USB needs more CPU, that is the downside…
 
Seriously though when capturing does anyone use thier computer for things other than browsing this forum?
 
In theory firewire can sustain 50MB/sec, in reality a bit less. DV stream is about 28MB/sec. For this reason I was weary of capturing to a firewire disk, as my first editing station could not handle this (iMac DV, rest in peace). Now I have two LaCie firewire disks (about 300 GB each) and I can capture to those disks with no problems. Apparently the system just sucks the data from tha camera and sends it to the disks without any bus capacity problems. The PC is fairly new (2 years) 3.2 GHz P4.
 
obelix said:
Because I only have ONE firewire controller, this means that when I capture video from my camera, this will take up some bandwidth (abut 25Mb/s right?). If I want to write to the external disk, this means that I need another 25Mb/s of bandwidth from the firewire controller.. This means that I need 50Mb/s in total which still is a lot less then what the firewire can handle…
Click to expand...

well, sort of. firewire shouldn't split up your bandwidth like usb 2.0 does. rather it will "switch". meaning you'll still be using 25Mb/s total, but the firewire controller will switch between the two devices very quickly to make it seem as if there are two dedicated 25Mb/s connections. same scheme that ethernet switches use to maintain a network connection.
 
DVracK: Firewire for the Camera, USB for the drive

DVracK: Firewire for the Camera, USB for the drive

It's been covered a bit, but not explicitly stated, but I'd recommend using Firewire just for the camera input, and USB 2.0 HS just for the hard drive output, rather than trying to mix both over Firewire - in fact, the makers of DVRack state that it most likely will not work perfectly if the camera and drive are sharing Firewire.
 
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