David Vasek wrote: > What would be firewire good for? Data transfer such as for full backups or cloning or audio/video. Haven't tested it yet on OpenBSD, I still have USB-only / ethernet-base storage for those systems. Subjectively, I find FW to be much faster than USB2 on my hardware using OS X and Ubuntu.
Notes from published comparisons below. YMMV: "Although the USB 2.0 is speedier than the FireWire, the latter beats it when used in high-speed storage devices. " http://ixbtlabs.com/articles/usb20vsfirewire/ "Read Test: 5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 33% faster than USB 2.0 160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 70% faster than USB 2.0 Write Test: 5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 16% faster than USB 2.0 160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 48% faster than USB 2.0 http://www.cwol.com/firewire/firewire-vs-usb.htm Tests USB2 FW % faster than USB 2.0 Test 1 (read) 6.12 8.14 32.99 Test 2 (read) 6.39 10.89 70.51 Test 1 (write) 5.11 5.92 15.85 Test 2 (write) 5.76 8.50 47.59 http://g4tv.com/techtvvault/features/39129/USB-20-Versus-FireWire_pg3.html "Our benchmarks show Firewire 800 is up to 46% faster than a drive connected to the more common Firewire 400, and about 29% faster than USB 2.0. " http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2602&p=15 regards, -Lars