What you NEED to know about firewire vs. USB and the new notebooks
I registered here for the sole reason of posting this thread, with hope that it can provide some basic real world education about various I/O ports and whether they are or are not useful. First, let me give you a little background to qualify my impending statements:
I am a recently graduated photography major from New York University. I have since been working in Africa as a high-def cinematographer filming documentary footage at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. I am here with a team of eight other people, and they rely on me as a go-to guy for any camera or computer related problem solving. I log the footage, I make the backups, I have worked as an editor using final cut on several films prior to this, all on Mac hardware. And I have been using macs since I was a young boy and a lifetime defender an supporter of apple's adventures in computing. And it would be fair to say I have a vested interest in the success of Apple as a company, because they make the tools I have come to rely on over years of varied hobbies and pursuits. As far as I am concerned, the magic of an apple computer over another brand is not merely the design or features or software but the holistic product that holds versatility as its most precious ideal. Indeed, what I love about using a mac is that it is a computer that finds a way to enhance my own pursuits as *I* see fit - it does not attempt to dictate my lifestyle by being an expensive one trick pony. I feel that's enough for now, please feel free to ask if you want more specifics.
I have worked with a variety of data storage interfaces - from external firewire 400 and USB2.0 drives to daisy chained FW800 drives to ESATA drives over an expresscard adapter to a stack of xserves over gigabit ethernet. And I have used all of these things in real world situations, both in a personal and production environment, which I feel qualifies me to comment on their real world performance.
I'l just come right out and say it: USB2.0 is crap. In my real world experience it is half as fast as FW400. This may be more a factor of the drives themselves than the actual standard but the real world figures still stand. It takes me a minute per gig to transfer data over any of the four different USB backup drives I have lying around here - drives that a consumer would likely purchase. One minute per gig is a bit less than 20MB/sec, or roughly HALF the speed I get with FW400 - close to 40MB/sec. When you are transferring HD video around which takes up quite a bit of space, this translates to literally twice as long to wait. What takes a half hour over FW400 takes a full hour over USB2.0. That's just how it is based on my experience.
USB is also much poorer at bidirectional transfer than firewire 400. That is to say more simply, USB is like a one way street while firewire is like a two way street. This has huge implications with things like even the most basic video editing, which needs to cache and move a ton of data from the drive into the RAM and then back into the drive as scratch data. With firewire the data can flow both ways at once - but in USB one stream must wait until the other is finished. This cuts your throughput in half. This is precisely why even though USB is rated around 40MB/sec you usually only see 20MB/sec. With firewire400 I always see the full ~40MB/sec transfer rate no matter what I'm doing.
Firewire 800 is of course faster than both 400 and USB, but since the only drives that have 800 ports are usually "pro" drives meant for full time video editing, and this is a consumer oriented post, I'll leave it at this: Firewire 800 rocks my socks off and if I could personally interface with a port, this would be the one! Daisy Chaining FTW!
But let's get beyond transfer rates for a bit because it can be easy to get lost in the details. Let's talk about compatibility. What we have on the new macbooks is plainly the loss of a feature previously had. The old ones had USB2.0 just like the new ones, but they also had firewire. Here are a whole list of things people already own that will no longer work as well, or work at all:
Firelite hard drives - these are popular FW400 portable drives that use bus power. Popular with prosumers and photographers because of their portability and performance
Any standard multi-interface external hard drive - now half as fast thanks to USB only
A cornucopia of audio peripherals that exclusively work with FW400 because of it's low latency and bidirectional data channels.
Many perfectly fine standard and high-def video cameras that have a firewire interface. I myself have a canon HV20 camcorder I bought just last May - a perfectly good consumer camcorder with a firewire HDV interface.
Now, many of you will glance over the above list and say "Well it doesn't matter because most people are dumb consumers and won't ever use this stuff." And my reply is that's precisely the wrong attitude to have. An attitude that favors fewer, more vanilla features removes the edge that apple needs to justify it's higher cost of entry. Sure, the machines are a good deal for the specs - but the low end models are still considerably more expensive than the low end models from other competitors. So it begs the question; How can you get me to spend $500 more for your product? What does it offer me that the cheaper one from brand X does not? For me, this used to be sheer versatility. My computer could behave like a netbook one day and then edit HD video the next. Did I know exactly what I would bve doing with the computer when I I bought it? No. But I was confident in my purchase because I knew that, most importantly, whatever it was that I might stumble into in the future, my mac would be there to help me with it, and it would never stand in the way of my desires to explore new areas as yet unkonwn to me. Without this assurance that your bases are covered - that the thing just works, as apple likes to market - it becomes increasingly hard to justify the high cost of entry, and the design improvements alone are not enough. If I wanted something that looked nice, was well built, and had two USB ports, there are about a thousand options out there that are a third of the price of the macbook, in all shapes an sizes. Of course they are not as well built, or as nicely designed, but such things become less important when the overall functionality is not any greater than the lowest common denominator. Sure the $500 HP laptop has a crappier processor - but what on earth are you going to [b]DO]/b] with that snappy and expensive core 2 duo in your new macbook? You're sure as hell not going to be editing HD video, because USB is to slow to do that in any meaningful way. You're sure as hell not going to be making music, because your firewire interfaces no longer plug in to your machine. Gone is that great spirit of exploration and freedom that owning a mac laptop once brought. No longer a question of "I wonder what it would be like to try this," now a mere statement of "I can't do this, because my computer is getting in the way." Isn't that precisely why many of us dislike the windows world in the first place? Because the machine gets in the way of the human creative process? I implore the apple execs to reconsider - as they may be trying to widen their market share at the expense of their true market. I implore them not to become just like those companies they claim to be so different from - companies that think only about the bottom line and economies of scale and opaque manufacturing processes. I used to feel a connection to the engineers who designed my apple. They thought like I did. The machines were perfectly balanced. Nothing you didn't need, everything you did. The very fact that there is even debate over this issue is a clear sign that something in the process has gone awry. I want to find a justification for this cut of a much loved feature but I'm finding it difficult to come by. The second apple starts culling features to fatten its bottom line, it is no longer the apple computer I grew up with. To put it into a pastoral perspective, the farm may have simply become too big.
Now that that little diatribe is over, I will move onto my last topic: target disk mode. Target disk mode is one of the most useful and most overlooked features that every mac in the past few years has been able to pull off. Basically, you could shut down a computer, plug it into another machine via firewire, turn it back on while holding the "T" key (for target), and that computer's hard drive would show up like a firewire drive on the other computer's desktop. Not only can you salvage files and do disk repairs this way, but it can be a quick and dirty way to transfer large files between computers if you don't have an external drive handy, and a time saver even if you do. The reason it can save time is because you are skipping a step of copying. Let's say you've made a little video with still photos from your last vacation, and saved it on your internal drive. It's likely to be a few gigs in size. You want to copy it over to a friend's computer so that they can watch it and show it to their friends. Now if you use an external drive you have to copy to file twice. Once to the external drive, and then from the external drive onto the other person's computer. So to move 5GB of data you've actually had to move 10GB of data (ten minutes minimum over USB2.0 in my experience, five minutes firewire400). Using target disk mode, on the other hand, is a direct transfer. You take 5GB from your drive and directly move it to the hard drive on the other computer. Two and a half minutes over firewire, and only one cable between the two computers. So what you used to be able to do in two and a half minutes with a single FW400 cable will now take ten minutes and require an external drive. Thanks, apple! Target disk mode was always one of my favorite features about macs and was a very useful functional and problem solving tool. This is now gone from the non-pro line, and it is disturbing. Macs are becoming increasingly just like everything else out there, and it is not to apple's benefit.
The good news is there is an easy way for apple to solve this dilemma! Just put a gosh darn FW400 port on the macbook, okay apple?! I promise, I won't tell anyone! ;P
Hope this has been somewhat informative, please ask any follow up questions and I will try my best to respond in a timely manner.
I am a recently graduated photography major from New York University. I have since been working in Africa as a high-def cinematographer filming documentary footage at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. I am here with a team of eight other people, and they rely on me as a go-to guy for any camera or computer related problem solving. I log the footage, I make the backups, I have worked as an editor using final cut on several films prior to this, all on Mac hardware. And I have been using macs since I was a young boy and a lifetime defender an supporter of apple's adventures in computing. And it would be fair to say I have a vested interest in the success of Apple as a company, because they make the tools I have come to rely on over years of varied hobbies and pursuits. As far as I am concerned, the magic of an apple computer over another brand is not merely the design or features or software but the holistic product that holds versatility as its most precious ideal. Indeed, what I love about using a mac is that it is a computer that finds a way to enhance my own pursuits as *I* see fit - it does not attempt to dictate my lifestyle by being an expensive one trick pony. I feel that's enough for now, please feel free to ask if you want more specifics.
I have worked with a variety of data storage interfaces - from external firewire 400 and USB2.0 drives to daisy chained FW800 drives to ESATA drives over an expresscard adapter to a stack of xserves over gigabit ethernet. And I have used all of these things in real world situations, both in a personal and production environment, which I feel qualifies me to comment on their real world performance.
I'l just come right out and say it: USB2.0 is crap. In my real world experience it is half as fast as FW400. This may be more a factor of the drives themselves than the actual standard but the real world figures still stand. It takes me a minute per gig to transfer data over any of the four different USB backup drives I have lying around here - drives that a consumer would likely purchase. One minute per gig is a bit less than 20MB/sec, or roughly HALF the speed I get with FW400 - close to 40MB/sec. When you are transferring HD video around which takes up quite a bit of space, this translates to literally twice as long to wait. What takes a half hour over FW400 takes a full hour over USB2.0. That's just how it is based on my experience.
USB is also much poorer at bidirectional transfer than firewire 400. That is to say more simply, USB is like a one way street while firewire is like a two way street. This has huge implications with things like even the most basic video editing, which needs to cache and move a ton of data from the drive into the RAM and then back into the drive as scratch data. With firewire the data can flow both ways at once - but in USB one stream must wait until the other is finished. This cuts your throughput in half. This is precisely why even though USB is rated around 40MB/sec you usually only see 20MB/sec. With firewire400 I always see the full ~40MB/sec transfer rate no matter what I'm doing.
Firewire 800 is of course faster than both 400 and USB, but since the only drives that have 800 ports are usually "pro" drives meant for full time video editing, and this is a consumer oriented post, I'll leave it at this: Firewire 800 rocks my socks off and if I could personally interface with a port, this would be the one! Daisy Chaining FTW!
But let's get beyond transfer rates for a bit because it can be easy to get lost in the details. Let's talk about compatibility. What we have on the new macbooks is plainly the loss of a feature previously had. The old ones had USB2.0 just like the new ones, but they also had firewire. Here are a whole list of things people already own that will no longer work as well, or work at all:
Firelite hard drives - these are popular FW400 portable drives that use bus power. Popular with prosumers and photographers because of their portability and performance
Any standard multi-interface external hard drive - now half as fast thanks to USB only
A cornucopia of audio peripherals that exclusively work with FW400 because of it's low latency and bidirectional data channels.
Many perfectly fine standard and high-def video cameras that have a firewire interface. I myself have a canon HV20 camcorder I bought just last May - a perfectly good consumer camcorder with a firewire HDV interface.
Now, many of you will glance over the above list and say "Well it doesn't matter because most people are dumb consumers and won't ever use this stuff." And my reply is that's precisely the wrong attitude to have. An attitude that favors fewer, more vanilla features removes the edge that apple needs to justify it's higher cost of entry. Sure, the machines are a good deal for the specs - but the low end models are still considerably more expensive than the low end models from other competitors. So it begs the question; How can you get me to spend $500 more for your product? What does it offer me that the cheaper one from brand X does not? For me, this used to be sheer versatility. My computer could behave like a netbook one day and then edit HD video the next. Did I know exactly what I would bve doing with the computer when I I bought it? No. But I was confident in my purchase because I knew that, most importantly, whatever it was that I might stumble into in the future, my mac would be there to help me with it, and it would never stand in the way of my desires to explore new areas as yet unkonwn to me. Without this assurance that your bases are covered - that the thing just works, as apple likes to market - it becomes increasingly hard to justify the high cost of entry, and the design improvements alone are not enough. If I wanted something that looked nice, was well built, and had two USB ports, there are about a thousand options out there that are a third of the price of the macbook, in all shapes an sizes. Of course they are not as well built, or as nicely designed, but such things become less important when the overall functionality is not any greater than the lowest common denominator. Sure the $500 HP laptop has a crappier processor - but what on earth are you going to [b]DO]/b] with that snappy and expensive core 2 duo in your new macbook? You're sure as hell not going to be editing HD video, because USB is to slow to do that in any meaningful way. You're sure as hell not going to be making music, because your firewire interfaces no longer plug in to your machine. Gone is that great spirit of exploration and freedom that owning a mac laptop once brought. No longer a question of "I wonder what it would be like to try this," now a mere statement of "I can't do this, because my computer is getting in the way." Isn't that precisely why many of us dislike the windows world in the first place? Because the machine gets in the way of the human creative process? I implore the apple execs to reconsider - as they may be trying to widen their market share at the expense of their true market. I implore them not to become just like those companies they claim to be so different from - companies that think only about the bottom line and economies of scale and opaque manufacturing processes. I used to feel a connection to the engineers who designed my apple. They thought like I did. The machines were perfectly balanced. Nothing you didn't need, everything you did. The very fact that there is even debate over this issue is a clear sign that something in the process has gone awry. I want to find a justification for this cut of a much loved feature but I'm finding it difficult to come by. The second apple starts culling features to fatten its bottom line, it is no longer the apple computer I grew up with. To put it into a pastoral perspective, the farm may have simply become too big.
Now that that little diatribe is over, I will move onto my last topic: target disk mode. Target disk mode is one of the most useful and most overlooked features that every mac in the past few years has been able to pull off. Basically, you could shut down a computer, plug it into another machine via firewire, turn it back on while holding the "T" key (for target), and that computer's hard drive would show up like a firewire drive on the other computer's desktop. Not only can you salvage files and do disk repairs this way, but it can be a quick and dirty way to transfer large files between computers if you don't have an external drive handy, and a time saver even if you do. The reason it can save time is because you are skipping a step of copying. Let's say you've made a little video with still photos from your last vacation, and saved it on your internal drive. It's likely to be a few gigs in size. You want to copy it over to a friend's computer so that they can watch it and show it to their friends. Now if you use an external drive you have to copy to file twice. Once to the external drive, and then from the external drive onto the other person's computer. So to move 5GB of data you've actually had to move 10GB of data (ten minutes minimum over USB2.0 in my experience, five minutes firewire400). Using target disk mode, on the other hand, is a direct transfer. You take 5GB from your drive and directly move it to the hard drive on the other computer. Two and a half minutes over firewire, and only one cable between the two computers. So what you used to be able to do in two and a half minutes with a single FW400 cable will now take ten minutes and require an external drive. Thanks, apple! Target disk mode was always one of my favorite features about macs and was a very useful functional and problem solving tool. This is now gone from the non-pro line, and it is disturbing. Macs are becoming increasingly just like everything else out there, and it is not to apple's benefit.
The good news is there is an easy way for apple to solve this dilemma! Just put a gosh darn FW400 port on the macbook, okay apple?! I promise, I won't tell anyone! ;P
Hope this has been somewhat informative, please ask any follow up questions and I will try my best to respond in a timely manner.
Comments
In my real world experience it is half as fast as FW400.
Generally I find USB is 30% slower but it is significant. This is partly to do with Apple's drivers though.
Daisy Chaining FTW!
Daisy chaining is ok when manufacturers put on the extra port. When they don't, it's a real nuisance.
"I can't do this, because my computer is getting in the way." Isn't that precisely why many of us dislike the windows world in the first place? Because the machine gets in the way of the human creative process?
In the case of audio equipment, it can be justified. For video capturing, not so much because tapeless storage is a better way forward. I would say that a 2 hour capture time vs a 20 minute transfer time gets in the way more.
You want to copy it over to a friend's computer so that they can watch it and show it to their friends. Now if you use an external drive you have to copy to file twice. Once to the external drive, and then from the external drive onto the other person's computer. So to move 5GB of data you've actually had to move 10GB of data (ten minutes minimum over USB2.0 in my experience, five minutes firewire400).
Sure but plug in an ethernet cable and you don't even have to reboot one of the machines and for me ethernet cables are usually easier to find, especially really long cables. Try doing a huge transfer from a tower on one side of a room to a tower on the other. What about transferring to/from a Windows drive. Ethernet works, target mode doesn't. I've copied 30-40GB of data at a time from a Windows machine that couldn't be done over firewire.
The good news is there is an easy way for apple to solve this dilemma! Just put a gosh darn FW400 port on the macbook, okay apple?! I promise, I won't tell anyone! ;P
FW400 is a badly designed port and it simply won't fit anyway. I do agree that a solution would have been nice for people who need to use firewire devices but there is a transition happening where we need to start thinking about the future.
Computers are getting more cores, not faster cores. We have GPUs going unused. We need fast reliable storage. It is good to have one all-encompassing standard for any given area. USB3 is this standard for data transfer and we need to start moving towards it.
There is a very long thread here btw, you may want to join in. I think pretty much everything has been covered by now:
http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?t=92061
Its a shame when our individual needs don't line up to products designed for the majority. No matter USB's technical shortcomings, it is sufficient and cost effective for the vast majority of computer users. (And this is coming from someone who owns six FW peripherals)
I'd say it's a bigger shame when the manufacturer doesn't give the buyers what they want. Moving forward today, Firewire 800 should be standard on all Macs.
Not that firewire is shit, or even bad. I in fact prefer firewire. Unfortunately most people won't use it and prefer not to pay for it.
Take note that Apple doesn't bundle gold-plated shit with every single model either...
"Buyers" will buy just about anything. Hell, people have paid top dollar for Jesus shaped pancakes. Seriously!
Not that firewire is a pancake, or even bad. I in fact prefer firewire. Unfortunately most people won't eat it and prefer not to pay for it.
Take note that Apple doesn't bundle Jesus shaped pancakes with every single model either...
Better?
Hmmm, looking back over my post, perhaps I should have used a less inflammatory analogy. How about replacing "gold-plated shit" with "jesus shaped pancakes"?
Better?
Just as incorrect as the first incarnation. That some people will not buy a new MacBook because of it lacking FW is not up for an argument, it's a fact.
Generally I find USB is 30% slower but it is significant. This is partly to do with Apple's drivers though.
Daisy chaining is ok when manufacturers put on the extra port. When they don't, it's a real nuisance.
In the case of audio equipment, it can be justified. For video capturing, not so much because tapeless storage is a better way forward. I would say that a 2 hour capture time vs a 20 minute transfer time gets in the way more.
Sure but plug in an ethernet cable and you don't even have to reboot one of the machines and for me ethernet cables are usually easier to find, especially really long cables. Try doing a huge transfer from a tower on one side of a room to a tower on the other. What about transferring to/from a Windows drive. Ethernet works, target mode doesn't. I've copied 30-40GB of data at a time from a Windows machine that couldn't be done over firewire.
FW400 is a badly designed port and it simply won't fit anyway. I do agree that a solution would have been nice for people who need to use firewire devices but there is a transition happening where we need to start thinking about the future.
Computers are getting more cores, not faster cores. We have GPUs going unused. We need fast reliable storage. It is good to have one all-encompassing standard for any given area. USB3 is this standard for data transfer and we need to start moving towards it.
There is a very long thread here btw, you may want to join in. I think pretty much everything has been covered by now:
http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?t=92061
<resurecting old thread>
USB was designed to replace the serial connections used for mice and keyboards. It found usefulness for some other connections as well.
Firewire was designed with media in mind.
USB has more overhead in protocols and such to deal with. So even with greater bandwidth available in USB 2.0, it still lags behind 1394.
USB requires a lot of babysitting by the host processor, firewire (from a good chipset like TI) can mostly get along on its own.