Why are my USB 2.0 connections faster than my Firewire?

[Keltik THC]

I have the Asus P6TD motherboard so i cannot get the eSATA working due to Marvell being a slack waste of a supposed driver company, and i always thought my firewire connections were slow.

I ran some tests this weekend, and it shows that my USB 2.0 is faster, like a lot.

copying a 1 gig games file (steam backup) from my WD RE3 to my external on USB 2.0 takes 30 seconds, copying the same file again to my external using fire wire took 1 minute 30 seconds!

So i tried sending a 4 gig file (video) from the external to the internal WD RE3, this took just over 4 minutes 30 seconds using the firewire and took just under 3 minutes on USB 2.0!

 

[JonJ678]

I'm fairly certain that esata is the same as sata, just with a shielded cable. As a result I don't see why drivers would be needed. If its the marvell ports causing issues, run an sata cable from the intel ports to a backplate for about £2.

No idea if firewire is meant to be faster than usb 2 or not, as I use usb and esata exclusively.

 

[Corasik]

USB2 is 480Mbps, while Firewire is 400Mbps (although there is an updated 800Mbps version with a different socket). Although USB2 has higher peak data rates generally its slower as it has a less efficient transfer protocol.

Most likely if firewire is slower on your computer, then either the drivers are poor, or there is a problem with the implementation either on the motherboard or your external disk, it it could even be a dodgey cable firewire has error checking and will force retransmission of dodgy data which will slow it up a lot... but more likely to be drivers or implementation problems.

That said, just use whatever is fastest for your system USB2 is a pretty decent connection.

 

[IAmATeaf]

It's more likely the implementation of the firewire controller on the external drive that's causing the slowdown. I tested firewire vs USB2 ages ago and for me firewire was most definitely quicker.