1602
Some basic info about USB (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
266 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 9 points 2 years ago (4 children)

I remember having a FireWire in one of the family desktops when I was a kid. Can't remember what we might have used it for, though.

It resides in the same vague memory hole as the Zip drive that we had.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 8 child comments
    •
  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Firewire was phenomenal for external hard drives. The speed was almost as fast as the drives so you were rarely limited by the port.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    Yep, that's because the actual data transfer was handled by the more capable device, instead of only the guest. I think the standard also required a minimum throughput, iirc, whereas USB only had a maximum.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago*

    Firewire was good for high bandwidth devices like external hard drives and video cameras because it didn't require the CPU to do any heavy lifting. These days USB is mature enough and CPUs are so fast that we (mostly) don't notice any performance impact but in the Core 2 Duo days you could easily max out one of your two cores with a large file transfer over USB.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    I had a FireWire hard drive! I remember I bought specifically the enclosure that supported both standards since my motherboard had a FireWire port and on paper it was faster than usb! Too bad the HDD was as slow as molasses

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent