Why is firewire not more popular ?

Zellio mentioined this in the other thread, and I'm curious.
Firewire 800 has better thruput than usb 2.0, yet firewire is not all that common. My dell M90 came with 6 usb ports and only 1 firewire (and that too I belive firewire 400). Thinkpads dont have firewire at all.
Plus firewire allow external devices to be daisy chained.

Why is firewire not more popular ?

 

i'm pretty sure it has to do with politics and $$$

 

Apple was greedy when they cooked up the original FireWire standard and few people wanted to pay their licensing fees. That gave time for USB 2.0 and Serial ATA to come to market. See the Wikipedia entry.

 

$2.25 does not a significant cost AT ALL, compared to external enclosures which cost $30+, laptops costing $700+ etc.

 

Convenience for the most part. Almost anything will plug into a USB port. Hard drives to optical mice. If you are going to load up the side of some laptop or computer, wouldn't you want to do it with what the consumer might have the most of?

Firewire has never really had any huge gains outside of the elusive FW800 that wasn't on many devices. It can be slightly faster, or use less cpu per given amount transfered, but is not as popular. These days with eSata, FW800 can be 1/3 to 1/4 the speed compared to the 3.0gbps max speed of SATA II. It caught on slow and got left behind.

2.25 adds up over a million or so machines pretty quickly.

 

But if the machines are so expensive to begin with, I doubt the end user would notice an extra $2.25.
When was the last time you didnt buy an electronic item because it was $3 more than your budget ?

 

There's not just the licencing fee, but the hardware may involve another less common and more expensive chip (at both ends of the connection). This certainly used to be the situation a few years ago.

If we could each customise our computer before it came off the production line then we could choose the components according to individual preference. Dell is the nearest to offering this choice but I am sure that you will have noticed that the cost of having the choice is much greater than the cost of the hardware.

And if the manufacturers put in every, relatively inexpensive, extra which a few people might want then you would discover that the bottom line became much bigger.

John

 

Well, when it gets down to various things with laptops and other electronic devices (hell anything for that matter), you load something up, and then cut down everything till it hits your target price. What if besides that 2.25, they had to spend 30 bucks more to redesign the case and support structure to fit in the firewire host controller, and then rework the motherboard to allow the new circuitry to fit around all the other stuff. Prices can really add up from weird sources, outside of a royalty fee.

 

That makes sense, thanks

 

Firewire just never caught on. There is a story to it but it comes down to the market.

I have not seen much difference in speeds from USB to Firewire. With less then 10% it's not a big deal.

 

Probably a mix of devices, FireWire started out being for pretty much only video cameras and hard drives. When started it USB supported those plus printers, mice, keyboards, tv tuners, etc. The greater number of devices supported for USB made the demand greater increasing development money thrown at USB devices instead of FireWire. Also, just because something is deemed better doesn't mean that's what the market will choose.

 

Firewire has worked so much better in linux.
I love that devices cann be daisy chained, with only one single cable coming to the computer.

 

Welcome to the world of hardware manufacturing. $2.25 is actually a lot of money when you're manufacturing a motherboard.

 

Really ???
Can the manufacturers not just pass on that 2.25 to end user ?

 

I personally wish FW800 was more popular, but it isn't :-(.

 

They could, but what about defective motherboards, where they end up paying the royalty without having an end user to pass it on to? Or motherboards that just never get sold (or only get sold at discounted prices)?

And probably just as importantly, they have to pay the royalties in advance, which might mean they have to fork out several million dollars to begin with, and then they have to *hope* that they'll recover it afterwards.

Even if they just pass on that expense, that still makes it harder for them to compete. OEM markets tend to care a lot about even small price changes, and if Dell decided to go with the competitor's mobo because it was $2.25 cheaper, you've lost *a lot* of money.

Margins are already pretty thin in this market to begin with, so no one want to increase their costs if they can avoid it.

Most end users may not care about $2.25 extra (although some will), but to businesses and OEM's, it may tip the balance.

And of course, it just piles up. Most components on the mobo cost only a few dollars, and if you start saying "Oh well, $3 more isn't too bad", where do you stop? What when the next component goes up in price, or they start charging royalties for something else? Suddenly you're paying $30 extra.

 

Because Apple is a childish, immature, inexperienced, clueless, hippie company with no idea of how to maintain a real user base for its products.

Woah harsh!

But it's true. If it wasn't for the iPod, they'd gone under a long time ago. As it is, right now it is a niche market competitor at best and their chief rival Bill Gates owns a large part of their stock. Also, the one button mouse is the second dumbest invention known to man since the square wheel.

 

Couldn't agree more! Have some rep!

 

Oooh thanks Jess! Made my day

 

And a bit off topic, no?

Spoken like a true apple basher who loves using windows Apple make mistakes, sure. Bill Gates contributed what..? and if Apple did not promote a mouse of any flavor you would be C:enter ###? I'll concede not every one wanted to pay Cadillac prices with hamburger taste.

Anyone not using firewire to burn your DVD's, grab video reliably or doing serious data back up risk the odd dropped frame or two or my favorite " Write Protect Fail" error using USB 2.0 I like USB but use my trusty firewire burners and drives for data back up when available.

 

So USB 2.0 is less reliable than firewire for data integrity ?

 

Um, if you get corrupt data with USB, you ought to call the motherboard manufacturer. It's just as reliable as firewire *when it works*. But yes, if you have defective hardware, you do risk losing data. Just like with Firewire.

No. Not if we assume that you have equal quality hardware for both.

 

Yes, only because Firewire is more consistent in transferring the data. USB is fine for everyday use though.

EDIT: Lol Jalf we contradict each other yet again I'm just gonna agree with whatever you say in the next topic to get back on track.

The video software company I work for usually uses firewire for encoding/decoding video to the tuner boxes (AJA IO) because its transfer rate is more steady than USB and results in less or no dropped frames, which is important if it's meant to be used by a TV station. Theoretically both firewire400 and USB2.0 have the same bandwidth (USB a little more), but practically firewire is a lot better for transferring large files safely.

 

IMH experience, heck yea. This excludes using dell for music creation, dell uses a lousy Firewire chip set. See the thread in the dell forum.

I do use USB2.0 regularly and most of the time have no problems. Even Apple includes a USB mouse

 

This probably is true for end-users -- $3 won't materially impact a purchase that is greater than $100.

But for manufacturers, saving $2.25 when you are selling hundreds of thousands -- or even a million -- items is enormous. Equipment manufacturers track costs to the penny. The penny. If savings can be realized, they will pursue it like a dog in heat.

For an eye-opening revelation about just how cut-throat the business world can be, why not watch an informative video on the biggest retailer on the planet, Wal*Mart. Link is here, it's a Frontline special. Watch how businesses and manufacturers live or die because of per-unit manufacturing costs that may differ by only pennies, and how businesses are relentlessly squeezed to drop costs. It's a good program, very informative, and it's impacting the way goods are bought and sold, even things we discuss here such as monitors, tvs, etc.

 

Completely untrue.

The errors you mention have nothing to do with firewire or USB. I back up my computer weekly an have yet to have your "Write Protect Fail" error in the 2 years that I've had and upgraded my current rig.

 

Higher transfer rates have nothing to do with transfer safety.

 

Please read back to me where I said, in that post you just so helpfully quoted, "Higher transfer rates make transfers safe".

 

Eh, firewire just never found a market, for the most part USB 1.1 was fast enough for every peripheral except hard drives and video cameras (transferring video to hard drive stuff), and I'm not sure but if I recall by the time external hard drives became popular USB 2.0 was out, why use firewire when you can use USB.

 

Very well then.

Proof?

 

I think you are missing something here Seraphim, the question was where it was posted that "Higher transfer rates make for safer transfers" or something like that. The statement made was "firewire is a lot better for transferring large files safely"

Nothing (necessarily) to do with the transfer speed.

 

THIS is what Gator stated "because its transfer rate is more steady than USB and results in less or no dropped frames"

A steadier connection will result in safe data transfer, thats an obvious and completely true - It was never stated that "higher transfer rates result in safer data" - Now the ? is - IS firewire a more steadier connection than USB -

 

From the wikipedia on USB:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Serial_Bus

"About the time that the 1394a standard was reaching completion, Apple threatened to charge $1.00 per port to license Apple's IP relating to 1394a (Apple had previously not charged any royalty for their IP in 1394). This fee was considered by many of the USB Core companies to be excessive so they started work on updating the USB standard to offer data rates that were competitive with 1394a. Even though the 1394 IP license fee was eventually set at $0.25 per system (a price set by a group of companies owning the "essential patents" contained in 1394), the work on USB 2.0 continued. Intel chose to use USB 2.0 in their chipsets rather than to require additional connectors to support 1394 as well as USB. Lack of 1394 support on Intel’s chipset virtually assured that 1394 would have no significant market penetration in the commercial PC market."
"USB was designed for simplicity and low cost, while FireWire was designed for high performance, particularly in time-sensitive applications such as audio and video."

 

I've had the opportunity to use FireWire and USB 1.1 on my external HDD enclosure. When transferring a large amount of files (backing up mp3's and the such) the FireWire was faster, but froze up after a short while during the copying and wouldn't complete the transfer. The USB connection always worked fine.

That was on my older Sony Vaio. So, that kind of turned me off to FireWire to start with. But I still liked the higher speed. Then USB 2.0 came around to equalize things (slightly faster). Didn't help me with my USB 1.1 ports on my Vaio, but I didn't go around looking for FireWire compatibility when something at least had USB 2.0 compatibility. Now that I've got USB 2.0 on my HP, I don't worry about FireWire at all (though, I have it as well). Honestly, this thread is the first I've heard about a new faster FireWire (FW800?).

My guess is that most consumers aren't completely informed, or just don't care. More peripherals are designed for use with USB so that's what people use. And the "mini-USB" cables that came out with cameras and camcorders and the such was a genius marketing strategy, because it almost looked like FireWire... to the point most people even thought it was a FireWire port when purchasing items with USB only support.

Bottom line why FireWire is less popular than USB... It was marketed by Apple and Sony (i-Link), two companies who are notorious for trying to keep a jaws-of-life grip on the exclusive use of a technology (examples: i-pod w/ i-tunes; Blu-Ray disc)

 

Random question, is a USB3.0 in the future, or is eSATA more likely to take that market?

 

Thanks for explaining guys, my goal in the original post was to point out that when you are encoding or decoding high quality video (usually 10 bit uncompressed) video, it is important to have a steady transfer rate that is capable of delivering the data to and from your hard drive. Firewire does this much better than USB2.0, as it was specifically designed by Apple with this task in mind. If we used USB2.0 to capture from a digital video source in our work place, we would experience a lot more dropped frames due to the uneven rate of data transfer. This is unacceptable when you are doing work for TV stations.

 

Unless you are talking about dropped live frames from a connection not keeping up, possibly. But if you transfer over a specific file, its going to get an exact copy out the other end just the same. Any dropped packets would mean a corrupt file. The only way USB2.0 would have problems compared to firewire is if the connection went to crap for a bit during a live stream that needed like 350mbps, and then all of a sudden the transfer speeds went to 100-200mbps. Without a buffer things would get messed up. But when is your connection going to fail like that? A hardware failure could cause it, but firewire would be in the same boat.

 

*sigh* Ok, then prove that USB2.0 is more"unstable."

 

Alright look, my earlier post insinuated that USB2.0 had uneven transfer speeds, especially when dealing with large data files. It did not insinuate that USB2.0 was "unstable". I never cared to find out all of the details about USB2.0 technology. But one thing I am absolutely, positively sure about is that Firewire was designed specifically for large file transfers---such as video capture/editting---and that USB was originally designed to complement this high speed interface by handling all the "little" I/O devices such as keyboard and mouse. But somewhere along the way, Apple made their typical foolish mistake of being immature and stupid, and jacked up the licensing cost of Firewire to some unacceptable level for manufacturers. So USB was, well hacked on the fly really, to support transfer rates that competed with Firewire. While this implementation of USB is just fine, it just was never designed specifically to handle the tasks I mentioned. And so when you have a contract with a TV station to encode/decode video and schedule play them, some real time and others not, you go with Firewire. If you don't buy this reasoning, then just take it as advice from someone in "the biz".

 

Oh I'm not disagreeing that firewire was meant for large file transfers, but your earlier posts implied and stated that USB somehow dropped packets or was less stable for tasks.

 

What he is referring is the same thing that can happen with a DV camcorder. You are not transfer a file, you are capturing video off a tape as it plays back. Firewire makes this possible by having a steady transfer rate. With USB 2.0, the transfer rates are more erratic, so not only will you drop frames, but the camera will also compress the video more and you may even have weird things happen, like no audio. USB simply cannot keep up with the video playback. Firewire is superior when it comes to very large files or time sensitive files, but most people do not transfer large files. Couple that with the usual politics and voila! USB dominates.

 

Thanks caschmonee for clarifying and settling this.
What you're saying makes good sense (and if that's what was originally meant, I retract my previous comments disagreeing)

So, just to wrap up.
USB has fine transfer rates overall. And it can handle large files. But for anything time-sensitive, it may be a problem because the transfer rate isn't as stable as with Firewire, so sometimes it might fall behind, which forces the sending camera to drop frames or increase compression or similar.

But for plain file-transfers, it's not a problem. The data will get transferred, and it will happen in about the same time as with Firewire, because overall, on average, USB's transfer rate is fine.

But yeah, ultimately, USB dominates because of politics, not because of any kind of superiority.

(Same story with Windows, and with x86 CPU's and a surprising amount of other technology)

 

Recently, I've been having problems with USB devices. The problem seems to be that many USB devices (notably HDDs) draw moe power than allowed by the usb standard.
Firewire, by comparison, can pump out more power I believe.

 

I love Firewire.

 

For these devices (3.5'' hard drives) you have to make sure that you plug the HD into its own power supply or you'll fry your motherboard. The same would probably happen whether you used firewire or USB.

I used to use firewire for my external HD, I spent a hell of a lot of time looking for an external HD that had firewire; it was much harder to find than I originally expected. Well, the only firewire cable that I could find to go with my HD was a $20 HP cable and I thought that was fine, but as it turns out the cable is a piece of crap and would result in corrupt files if I tried large file transfers with it. So now I use USB 2.0, just because the only firewire cable that I could find sucked.

 

They ARE plugged in.
There are also 2.5 external HDDs that are powered solely by USB (they do not have nay other power supply).