usb vs firewire 400

J

Jeff In Ocala

Active member
I shoot with 2 hvx's and I edit with edius and store a lot of my projects on external Hard Drives is there a preference for usb or firewire as far as editing from the external drives, I guess I'm asking which has more speed to keep everything realtime.
Thanks
Jeff
 

Comparison to USB

Although high-speed USB 2.0 runs at a higher signaling rate (480 Mbit/s) than FireWire 400, typical USB PC-hosts rarely exceed sustained transfers of 35 MB/s (280 Mb/s), with 30 MB/s (240 Mb/s) being more typical (the theoretical limit for a USB 2 high-speed bulk transfer is 53.125 MB/s). This is likely due to USB's reliance on the host-processor to manage low-level USB protocol, whereas FireWire automates the same tasks in the interface hardware. For example, the FireWire host interface supports memory-mapped devices, which allows high-level protocols to run without loading the host CPU with interrupts and buffer-copy operations.
FireWire 800 is substantially faster than Hi-Speed USB.
Click to expand...
from Wikipedia.

In my experience, FW is faster.
 
Read and write tests to the same IDE hard drive connected using FireWire and then Hi-Speed 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
 
great thanks for the technical info guys now i just wish my local best buy carried the seagates with firewire instead of only usbs
 
yeah my BB here used to carry the seagates with FW but now all they seem to carry is the usb and e sata. I have a preference for seagates been using them a long time and found them the most reliable.
 
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