Shared firewire or USB 2.0?

  • Thread starter Thread starter anttipi
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anttipi

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I just ordered the Midiman Firewire 410 and next I will have to buy an external harddrive for my laptop.

My question: Firewire or USB 2.0?

I know Firewire is faster (at least according to the benchmarks I've seen) but there is only one firewire port on my laptop so I would have to share it between two devices. Wouldn't this eat up the bandwidth (resulting in latency issues etc.)? In that case, wouldn't it be better if just the Firewire 410 was connected to the firewire port and the harddrive was USB 2.0?

And is there any difference performance-wise between PCMCIA firewire cards, firewire hubs or simply chaining two firewire devices together? Hubs to my knowledge require external power which isn't very good if you want to have a mobile studio.
 
i'm not a hardware expert, but if chaining firewire devices is akin to chaining SCSI devices, I would do that before i would consider mixing protocols.

is the additional HD for audio? if so, and you purchased the firewire unit rather than a USB unit, why would you then run the risk of slowing down your system by putting your actual audio on usb?

what needs to be ascertained is the bandwidth (how broad) firewire is compared to usb. much in the same way that SCSI has a higher bandwidth than UDMA, firewire may have a broader bandwidth than USB2.0.

read this about the bandwidth and cpu utilization difference between usb2 and firewire:
http://www.frozentech.com/article.php?story_id=27
 
Yeah, I found the same article with Google the other day. Firewire seems to be faster in practice.

Of course I'd rather get a firewire hd than a USB 2.0. However, as I have only one firewire port (and my audio interface will be firewire) I was wondering if adding another firewire device (the hd) to the _same_ port would clog the bandwidth.

I have free USB 2.0 ports right now so maybe it would be wiser to use those for the hd instead? I mean, the firewire capacity is 400 mbit/sec so wouldn't sharing it result in 200 mbit/sec for each device?! In that case I think USB 2.0 would be a better way to go (no bandwidth sharing problems).

I'm not that good with these things and I've been desperately trying to find some info on this. If I go firewire I will also have to decide between a hub and a PCMCIA card (or just linking the two devices together) and I don't know which is the best solution - or if there's any difference to begin with.
 
christiaan said:
The bandwidth of Firewire gives plenty of headroom for both a Firewire 410 and a hard drive to work smoothly.
Click to expand...

OK, thanks Christiaan! I think I'll go with firewire then.

Still I'd like to know whether it makes a difference if I use a hub or just link the hd to the soundcard (or vice versa)? And then there's this PCMCIA option.
 
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