ARS on the Death of the IEEE 1394 FireWire
Richard C. Moss – Jun 22, 2017
Good, bad, I’m the guy with the plug
From our “Brief history of the USB,” here’s a quick summary on the pros and cons of FireWire’s tech:FireWire had a few advantages over USB in its time. FireWire devices could be daisy-chained to one another, meaning you only really needed one port on your computer to connect dozens of devices; FireWire operations didn’t require as much work from the host system’s CPU; and FireWire could transfer data in both directions simultaneously (“full-duplex”) where USB 1.1 and 2.0 could only transfer things in one direction at a time (“half-duplex”). FireWire was also typically faster than contemporaneous USB ports. FireWire 400 supported speeds of up to 400Mbps, compared to 12Mbps for USB 1.1 devices, and FireWire 800 went up to 800Mbps while USB 2.0 operated at 480Mbps.
The biggest problem with FireWire was that it was more expensive to implement, requiring its own controller chips in both computers and peripherals. In the standard’s early days, using the FireWire name also required paying a licensing fee to Apple, which had begun its long turnaround in the very late ’90s and early 2000s but was nowhere near as influential as it is today. This led to a confusing array of different names for what was essentially the same standard, including Sony’s i.LINK and the decidedly awkward “IEEE 1394” name. Jumping from FireWire 400 to FireWire 800 also required different cables, where USB 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, and 3.0 have managed to use physically compatible connectors across all generations of the standard (with some allowances made for mini and micro variants of those connectors).
As a result, FireWire gained traction in high-end external storage products and video equipment that needed a lot of bandwidth, but USB remained cheaper and therefore more widely used and more widely supported.