FireWire Port Hub

[Tevya Washburn]

I just remembered a couple things after posting (are these forums ever going to get edit, bump, & other features that other “modern” forums have?): One main one in my descision to go with Firewire was that it also requires less CPU power to opperate. Thus when you’re transfering data via USB, it may hit higher speeds, but pulls more from your system to do so. Now that I think about it, maybe this has something to do with our different results. Are you guys on dual-core, or dual CPU systems? If so, maybe your machines are able to sustain a higher transfer rate, while still allowing you to do other things without interupting that data flow because of the dual cores. I’m still stuck on a single CPU, single core system.

So maybe in the “olden days” Firewire was better, but with newer, better tech, USB 2 wins out. However, I’d assume that Firewire 800 with it’s much higher bandwidth trumps them both.

–the Fiddler

[Peter Wright]

If you’re capturing either DV or HDV, then either USB2 or Firewire can handle the job fine.

The fact that F/W uses the CPU less and has a higher sustained data rate is technically correct, but unless using the alternative results in dropped frames, why worry?

Peter Wright
Perth, Western Oz
http://www.allroundvision.com.au