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FireWire ports are quite similar to USB ports in some aspects, while there is a day and night difference in some other aspects. FireWire ports are also serial ports, like USBs. The FireWire technology has been employed for data transfer between electronic devices. The FireWire cables are hot pluggable. This means that you can plug in, transfer data and plug out the cable from the electronic devices at any time, when they are powered on. Being a high bandwidth interface, it can allow high speeds of data transfer as well. Data transfer rates of 400Mbps can be achieved with FireWire ports.
FireWire ports were introduced by Apple in their Macbooks in 1995. Slowly they started making their way into other electronic gadgets, like camcorders, digital cameras, printers, scanners, other laptops and more.
Apart from high speed, FireWire transfer also keeps intact the data quality. Due to this characteristic, FireWire transfer is mainly used for image and video transfers between digital cameras and camcorders to computers, laptops or printers. There will be no degradation of image quality with these ports.
The best part about FireWire ports is that they can be used for transferring information between 2 devices that are independent of each other. You can directly transfer files between 2 cameras or from the camera to the printer, without the need of a computer. This is one of the main differences between a USB port and a FireWire port. For USB data transfer, one of the devices involved has to be a computer or laptop. Therefore a USB transfer is a master-slave or host based transfer. On the other hand, the FireWire transfer is a peer-to-peer transfer. FireWire ports are less time consuming, faster and more convenient to use. The convenience factor comes in, when you need to print out or scan some images from your digital camera. You don’t need to transfer the images to the computer’s hard drive before printing or scanning. You can directly connect your digital camera to the printer/scanner via the FireWire port and get them printed/scanned. There is one aspect that has the USB scoring better marks than the FireWire. While there are almost 127 devices that are compatible with USB, there are only about 63 gadgets that offer Firewire ports.
The latest advancement in FireWire technology has brought about a data transfer speed of almost 800Mbps with FireWire ports. USB 2.0 ports only achieve about 400Mbps. The future might see many more electronic devices employing FireWire ports for data transfer and this might totally make USB ports extinct.
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