Why did USB win out over Firewire??

EvilFranky · 16 Jan 2010 at 15:43

I've recently acquired a HD for backing up purposes and a HD docking station for quick easy access to internal drives.

It's USB2 as most things and I knew transfer rates are never going to be lightening...but 25-30MB a sec a absolutely dire. It will literally take me over a day to back up my RAID array.

My question as in the title, why did such a **** technology win out over a blatantly superior one? Was it down to Apple and licensing?

I work out that at those figures at best USB2 will give you 240Mbits/s through put rather than the marketing 480Mbits/s. I know all devices fight for contention, but come on all I have is a mouse and keyboard plugged in!

Sorry just venting my frustrations, but I am interested to know why Firewire fizzed out.

Rostam · 16 Jan 2010 at 15:48

Honestly i oftain wonder the same question and i guess it just boils down to marketing.

pcAnywhere · 16 Jan 2010 at 16:15

Betamax was superior to VHS
HD-DVD was superior to Blue-Ray

It's the acceptance of the technology by manufacturers that decides which technology will win; not which is the best

robmagee · 16 Jan 2010 at 16:36

Yeah it was support, when apple moved that was it

EvilFranky · 16 Jan 2010 at 16:38

pcAnywhere said:
Betamax was superior to VHS
HD-DVD was superior to Blue-Ray

It's the acceptance of the technology by manufacturers that decides which technology will win; not which is the best

HD-DVD better than Blu-Ray? That's not true though.

But why did manufacturers choose USB over Firewire?

Anth · 16 Jan 2010 at 17:02

EvilFranky said:
HD-DVD better than Blu-Ray? That's not true though.

Disagree. Size is not everything.

I have a feeling that USB was provided by Intel, Intel are known for giving kickbacks to companies supporting it over others.

What is worse is originally we had Firewire vs USB1. USB1 is pathetic, I remember on my very old PC (bought top line in Christmas 2002 and lasted till 2006) this had USB1 and I bought a USB DVD burner non the wiser and it took 4hours to burn a DVD.

With USB2 I could manage 6x burns.

Really USB3 is on the way soon and this is supposed to rival SATA2 speeds so lets see if this is true.

Here is a good article comparing the speeds of USB2 with Firewire400 and Firewire800

http://lindauermacs.com/wordpress/2...rd-drives-firewire-vs-usb-why-should-we-care/

Macworld did some testing, using a MacBook Pro (2.4 GHz 17″, 160 GB 5400RPM drive, 2GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.6.2) and a 2TB Western Digital My Book Studio drive, copying a 1GB file from the WD to the internal drive on the MB Pro.

FireWire 400 was 23% faster. Duplicating the same file on the WD drive took 10% less time with FireWire 400 over USB. Copying a 2.5GB folder with 5000 files, FireWire 400 26% faster.

EvilFranky · 16 Jan 2010 at 17:15

Anth said:
Disagree. Size is not everything.

I have a feeling that USB was provided by Intel, Intel are known for giving kickbacks to companies supporting it over others.

What is worse is originally we had Firewire vs USB1. USB1 is pathetic, I remember on my very old PC (bought top line in Christmas 2002 and lasted till 2006) this had USB1 and I bought a USB DVD burner non the wiser and it took 4hours to burn a DVD.

With USB2 I could manage 6x burns.

Really USB3 is on the way soon and this is supposed to rival SATA2 speeds so lets see if this is true.

Here is a good article comparing the speeds of USB2 with Firewire400 and Firewire800

http://lindauermacs.com/wordpress/2...rd-drives-firewire-vs-usb-why-should-we-care/

Thanks for the link, will give that a read!

Why do you think HD-DVD is better than Blu-Ray then?

Anth · 16 Jan 2010 at 17:45

EvilFranky said:
Why do you think HD-DVD is better than Blu-Ray then?

The technology, (would have to read up for exactness) but in general, the lazer needs to be incredibly close to the surface of the disk on blu-ray.

This was why the protective coating was needed on blu-ray to stop the lazer getting shattered during reading the disks.

This is not the case on HD-DVD

Here is a quick copy of one of the issues this can cause from wikipedia

DVDs have a different structure from CDs, using a plastic disc over the reflecting layer. This means that a scratch on either surface of a DVD is not as likely to reach the reflective layer and expose it to environmental contamination and perhaps to cause corrosion, perhaps progressive corrosion. Blu-ray disks are more like CDs in that the reflective layer is at a disk surface, though in Blu-ray disks, it is the reading surface, not the label surface. Blu-ray disk producers have developed several surface coatings which are intended to reduce susceptibility to scratches and abrasion

And further info

Blu-ray Discs contain their data relatively close to the surface (less than 0.1 mm) which combined with the smaller spot size presents a problem when the surface is scratched as data would be destroyed. To overcome this, TDK, Sony, and Panasonic each have developed a proprietary scratch resistant surface coating. TDK trademarked theirs as Durabis, which has withstood direct abrasion by steel wool and marring with markers in tests.[11]

HD DVD uses traditional material and has the same scratch and surface characteristics of a regular DVD. The data is at the same depth (0.6 mm) as DVD as to minimize damage from scratching. As with DVD the construction of the HD DVD disc allows for a second side of either HD DVD or DVD.

Personally speaking I would rather have HD-DVD disk technology with 10Gig less per layer.

thepeganator · 16 Jan 2010 at 17:47

Iirc, firewire has a royalty fee to be paid on it, unlike usb where no payment is needed.

Edit:

wiki said:
However, the royalty which Apple and other patent holders initially demanded from users of FireWire (US$0.25 per end-user system) and the more expensive hardware needed to implement it (US$1–$2), both of which have since been dropped, have prevented FireWire from displacing USB in low-end mass-market computer peripherals, where product cost is a major constraint.[3]

Cobalt · 16 Jan 2010 at 20:03

Isn't USB also more CPU intensive compared to the same speed of fireWire?

Anyway, royalties on fireWire and the massive amounts of chip sets Intel ship pretty much guaranteed USB a win.

off topic:
HD-DVD also had no region encoding in the released spec:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hd-dvd#Digital_rights_management

There is no Region Coding in the existing HD DVD specification, which means that titles from any country can be played in players in any other country.

Ok, so not a huge selling point but one less headache in the ever increasing list of DRM applied to modern media.

robmagee · 16 Jan 2010 at 20:10

DId any intel or amd chipsets ever support firewire?