Could someone explain firewire please???

[Signal 9 Studio]

A friend of mine is helping me to update my small studio. I use adats with connect to sinc the file for Vegas. We are gonna set up a seperate station for transfering files and a seperate PC for mixing. He suggested I get two firewire cards and an external Drive. What exactly are the firewire cards and HD for? What purpose will they serve? I currently am in a different state than he is and am turning to you guys for a little info.

 

[johnzo]

A friend of mine is helping me to update my small studio. I use adats with connect to sinc the file for Vegas. We are gonna set up a seperate station for transfering files and a seperate PC for mixing. He suggested I get two firewire cards and an external Drive. What exactly are the firewire cards and HD for? What purpose will they serve? I currently am in a different state than he is and am turning to you guys for a little info.

This is what i understand about firewire. In short, Firewire cards allow you to attach firewire devices (External Hard Drives, Video Cameras, Other Devices). Firewire's transfer rate is much faster than the old USB 1.1. But you gotta make sure that the peripherals / devices support firewire before you buy them as not all of them do.

USB 2.0 is relatively new and faster than firewire... so you might wanna consider that too.

Transfer rates:

USB 1.1 12 Mbps
Firewire 400 Mbps
USB 2.0 480 Mbps

Hope that helps!

 

[bennychico11]

actually, Firewire will give you better performance.
FireWire, uses a "Peer-to-Peer" architecture in which the peripherals are intelligent and can negotiate bus conflicts to determine which device can best control a data transfer

Now, USB 2.0 uses a Master/Slave architecture in which the computer handles all decision functions and dictates data flow to, from and between the attached peripherals (adding additional system overhead and resulting in slower data flow control) .
And actually if you find a device that has 1394(b)...another version of firewire...it can support up to 800Mbps. Now in terms of hard drives, I've always just stuck with internal ones. Mainly 'cause these have even MORE throughput than firewire or USB. However, external ones are nice if you don't have room inside the computer, need it to be portable, or just want to look cool. However, if your friend is saying to get a firewire card and an external drive it's probably because he wants you to get a dedicated audio hard drive so you're not recording on the system drive....and recommending firewire so it's just plug and play.