Both Firewire and USB connections transfer data at very high speeds.
Firewire and USB are two types of connections through which a computer user can rapidly transfer data from one device to another. They were both developed in the mid-1990s, but Firewire has become less common than USB, which has become increasingly standardized. However, enough devices still use Firewire, causing Firewire-to-USB cables or "hubs" to be very useful, particularly for someone who works frequently with digital video.
Firewire
Firewire -- also called, less elegantly, IEEE 1395 -- was developed by Apple in 1995 as a hardware connection and protocol for transferring a lot of data very fast. These data transfer speeds were becoming necessary with the advent of digital video. The primary impetus of Firewire was to allow a user to quickly transfer high-quality video onto a computer hard drive or into memory. A Firewire connection can transfer about 50 megabytes of data per second.
USB
Universal Serial Bus, also developed in 1995, is a similar technology allowing for rapid data transfer. Unlike Firewire, it was not developed primarily for video transfer, and many manufacturers of many different kinds of hardware gradually adopted it for use as a connector. Today, USB is an industry-wide standard, and keyboards, mice, external hard drives, and wireless receivers usually connect to a computer via USB. The USB 2.0 standard, released in 2000, achieves data transfer speeds of around 40 megabytes per second, and newer versions of the USB standard are still faster while retaining compatibility with older USB devices.
Firewire to USB
A Firewire to USB connector is simply a cable with a Firewire plug on one end and a USB plug on the other, allowing you to connect a Firewire device to a computer's USB port, or vice versa. Such cables are expensive, and as Firewire-only devices disappear to be replaced by the USB standard, they are becoming increasingly rare. Nevertheless, if you have an older digital camera or camcorder without a USB output, a Firewire to USB cable could be extremely useful.
Firewire/USB Hubs
More common, although more expensive, are Firewire/USB "hubs" -- devices with both Firewire and USB inputs and a single output through which they are connected to a computer. With a hub, you can plug multiple devices, using multiple connection formats, into a single computer port.
Tags: data transfer, computer port, data transfer speeds, data very, digital video
