firewire and usb
I'm new to firewire and usb 2.0 and I've got a few questions:
1) I've got a usb camera and a usb hard drive enclosure. They worked fine on my PC, but they don't work with my 15" powerbook and don't even seem to be powered. Is this caused by incompatibilities with my powerbook?
2) I'm going to purchase a firewire hard drive enclosure. This will be for playing audio and video media. Will firewire 400 suffice or should I go for 800? Also what can I do with an enclosure with 2 ports?
3) I remember a while back, that there was some sort of difference between Mac and PC firewire. I think something about the number of pins. What is this about and is it still an issue. Thanks.
1) I've got a usb camera and a usb hard drive enclosure. They worked fine on my PC, but they don't work with my 15" powerbook and don't even seem to be powered. Is this caused by incompatibilities with my powerbook?
2) I'm going to purchase a firewire hard drive enclosure. This will be for playing audio and video media. Will firewire 400 suffice or should I go for 800? Also what can I do with an enclosure with 2 ports?
3) I remember a while back, that there was some sort of difference between Mac and PC firewire. I think something about the number of pins. What is this about and is it still an issue. Thanks.
Comments
Originally posted by soberbrain
I'm new to firewire and usb 2.0 and I've got a few questions:
1) I've got a usb camera and a usb hard drive enclosure. They worked fine on my PC, but they don't work with my 15" powerbook and don't even seem to be powered. Is this caused by incompatibilities with my powerbook?
It depends on which PowerBook you have. Only the latest revision has USB 2 ports - the rest have USB 1 ports. With the camera, you're absolutely sure it doesn't work? Maybe it's not supported by iPhoto. With the hard drive enclosure, it might not work if the hard drive is formatted for PC - as in, it has FAT32 or NTFS file systems. You can reformat it in HFS+ for use on a Mac. Also, USB 2 devices should work even on computers with USB 1 ports, they'll just be very slow. I'd suggest getting a new hard drive enclosure (preferably Firewire) if your PowerBook only has USB 1 ports.
Originally posted by soberbrain
2) I'm going to purchase a firewire hard drive enclosure. This will be for playing audio and video media. Will firewire 400 suffice or should I go for 800? Also what can I do with an enclosure with 2 ports?
Firewire 400 is sufficient for basically any normal use. Firewire 800 is good if you have multiple drives connected, so each one can use the full bandwidth. If you have just one drive, though, Firewire 400 is more than enough even for the fastest hard drives. Most drive enclosures have two Firewire ports so you can daisy chain devices. Since many computers have only one Firewire port, it's useful to be able to connect two devices at once. You can have a bunch of Firewire hard drives all connected on a single port using the daisy-chaining method.
Originally posted by soberbrain
3) I remember a while back, that there was some sort of difference between Mac and PC firewire. I think something about the number of pins. What is this about and is it still an issue. Thanks.
There's no such thing as "Mac" and "PC" Firewire. However, Macs all use 6-pin, powered Firewire ports, whereas many PCs use smaller, 4-pin Firewire. There are adapters that can convert between the two, so the main difference is that 4-pin Firewire carries no power. It's used generally on DV cameras, and 4-pin Firewire ports are present on many Sony computers (they call it i.Link). Various other companies put Firewire on their computers, and it can either be 4-pin or 6-pin. A lot of subnotebooks use 6-pin Firewire for external optical drives.
Hope this helps.
an NTFS drive is now readable.