Is IEEE1394 better than USB 2.0?

Question

Is IEEE 1394 Hot Swappable because I know that USB is and which has a faster transfer rate.

Answer 1

IEEE 1394 (FireWire) is hot-swapable and quite comparable to USB 2.0...here are the specs...

USB 2.0
- 1.5 Mbit/s 12Mbit/s 480Mbit/s supported.
- USB controller is required to control the bus and data transfer.
- Cable up to 5 m.
- Up to 127 devices supported.
- Power supply to external devices is 500 mA/5V (max).
- Full compatibility with USB 1.1 devices.

FireWire (IEEE1394)
- 100 Mbit/s 200Mbit/s 400Mbit/s supported.
- Works without control, devices communicate peer-to-peer.
- Cable up to 4.5 m.
- Up to 63 devices supported.
- Power supply to external devices is 1.25A/12V (max.).
- The only computer bus used in digital video cameras.

Judge for yourself which is better.
Hope this helped.

Answer 2

IEEE 1394 is available in two different speeds: 400 mbps and 800 mbps. Even though USB 2.0 claims 480 mbps as its speed, it is slower than IEEE 1394 at the 400 mbps rating. That's because those are maximum speeds and 1394 not only comes much closer to its maximum speed in real world use, it also places much lower demands on the rest of the system. That means that your computer can be doing other things while the 1394 bus transfers information, but the USB 2.0 bus requires the processor's attention.

Answer 3

A very fast external bus standard that supports data transfer rates of up to 400Mbps (in 1394a) and 800Mbps (in 1394b). Products supporting the 1394 standard go under different names, depending on the company. Apple, which originally developed the technology, uses the trademarked name FireWire. Other companies use other names, such as i.link and Lynx, to describe their 1394 products.

A single 1394 port can be used to connect up 63 external devices. In addition to its high speed, 1394 also supports isochronous data -- delivering data at a guaranteed rate. This makes it ideal for devices that need to transfer high levels of data in real-time, such as video devices.

Although extremely fast and flexible, 1394 is also expensive. Like USB, 1394 supports both Plug-and-Play and hot plugging, and also provides power to peripheral devices.

Answer 4

Firewire is hot swappable.
Firewire is also faster than USB.

FireWire 400 can transfer data between devices at 100, 200, or 400 Mbit/s data rates (the actual transfer rates are 98.304, 196.608, and 393.216 Mbit/s, ie 12.288, 24.576 and 49.152MBytes per second respectively).

FireWire 800 (Apple's name for the 9-pin "S800 bilingual" version of the IEEE 1394b standard) was introduced commercially by Apple in 2003. This newer 1394 specification and corresponding products allow a transfer rate of 786.432 Mbit/s with backwards compatibility to the slower rates and 6-pin connectors of FireWire 400.

The signaling rate of USB 2.0 Hi-Speed mode is 480 Mb/s, while the signaling rate of FireWire 400 (IEEE 1394a) is 393.216 Mb/s [9]. USB requires more host processing power than FireWire due to the need for the host to provide the arbitration and scheduling of transactions. USB transfer rates are theoretically higher than FireWire due to the need for FireWire devices to arbitrate for bus access. A single FireWire device may achieve a transfer rate for FireWire 400 as high as 41 MB/s, while for USB 2.0 the rate can theoretically be 55 MB/s (for a single device). In a multi-device environment FireWire rapidly loses ground to USB: FireWire's mixed speed networks and long connection chains dramatically affect its performance.

Despite all this and despite USB's theoretically higher speed, in real life benchmarks the actual speed of FireWire hard drives nearly always beats USB 2 hard drives by a significant margin (for example [10]). In addition to this, some operating systems take a conservative approach to scheduling transactions and limit the number of transfers per frame, reducing the maximum transfers from, say, the theoretical 13 per frame to 10 or 9.

It has been noted by some research that the Windows PC implementation of USB 2.0 has much higher performance than that of a Mac implementation[2], though at the time of this writing, the study is by now quite dated and old.

In 2002, FireWire was updated with the IEEE 1394b specification. This provides a new datarate called S800, which operates at 786.432 Mb/s, and a new arbitration scheme which scales better to higher data rates. S800 requires a new physical layer, but S800 nodes can be connected to existing FireWire 1394a ports, just as USB high-speed nodes will operate with older full-speed hosts. However, unlike USB Hi-Speed systems, which can change the speeds on each branch, data are sent to or received from a 1394a device at this device's speed (or less if there are even slower nodes in between) and using legacy arbitration. IEEE 1394b also provides rates up to approximately 3.2 Gb/s; however, the higher rates use special physical layers which are incompatible with 1394a devices

Please take in account that USB is more popular than FireWire. Many PC's and Laptops have USB ports standard, FireWire is not.

Answer 5

USB is the faster and alot more devices than firewire and they're both hot swappable

Answer 6

Firewire (IEEE1394) is faster
If by hot swappable you been you can plug in one device and then plug in a different one without any configuration issues then yes it is.

Answer 7

IEEE1394 Is a firewire port, correct? I might be wrong, but i am sure this is for internet connection and whatnot, USB is totally different as it transfers files between a computer and another portable device so , as far as i know, no they are not