USB vs FireWire

another interesting way we could start off our podcast. Okay, that would be with listener made Yeah. I feel ambushed. Yeah, well you know you walked right into that one. So here's a listener mail from Leanna, and Leanna says, I was wondering what's USB two point oh all about? Will all my peripherals for my laptop stop working if I don't install a USB two point oh hub. It'd be cool to hear a podcast on this, Thanks Leanna. Hopefully

we didn't get to this too late. USB two point i has been around for a while, Yeah, quite some time. Chances are you're actually using USB two point oh peripherals right now. In fact, um, I would be very surprised to hear that you were using USB one point one. Uh, two point oh has been the standard for a while, and three point oh. The three point oh um specifications were released last year. We can expect to see USB three point oh devices probably sometime in two thousand ten.

I would say, yeah, I've seen as early as this year, but uh, it's gonna take him a while to get it in rolled out into the in the individual Yeah, things like things like digital cameras and and B three players and all that kind of stuff. It'll it's gonna take a little while. But you asked, what's the deal about it? And do you need a hub and all these kind of questions. We're gonna tackle that. So USB it's really a method of transferring data back and forth

between different devices using a cable, a USB cable, yep um. USB. Going back to uh the very beginning, USB is actually sort of an old technology now. I mean one point oh was launched in November, and the first really the one that that really took off was one point one, which came out in September, which, uh, ironically was the same month that they launched the Bondai Blue iMac. The very very first iMac, which was the first computer that used only USB and no other technologies. Right, so you

might wonder, Okay, so what's the big deal with USB? USB? First of all, it stands for Universal Serial Bus, and a USB is just a way of connecting a device to something like a computer. Um, actually it is a computer. I mean computer acts as the host for for USB devices. And the reason why USB is such a big deal is before USB, you had lots of proprietary or very specialized kinds of cables and plugs you had to use for different kinds of devices if you wanted to hook

them up to your computer, like parallel cereal scuzzy. Yeah. Yeah. You had all these different different things like if you had a printer, then you were going to use a parallel printer port, which were you know, these pretty wide uh cables. Monitors had their own kind of connectors, modems had their own kind of connectors um. And then you had other devices like special joysticks or whatever where you would have to buy a specific kind of card that

you would have to install inside your computer. UM and the at one end of the card was essentially a port and you would plug the device into that port and pretty much. Usually those ports were only good for very specific devices. You couldn't you know, you couldn't multitask with one of these things. So it ended up where you had all these different proprietary plugs and all these different proprietary ports, and it wasn't easy to switch out gadgets.

Um if you decided that you wanted to upgrade, you might have to buy a whole bunch of new new hardware in order to upgrade. It just wasn't very convenient. Now, the Universal Serial Bus is much more convenient because it's a cable that if you create a device that uses this, then you know you can plug it into the same port as you would any other USB device. So you could use let's say you've got a USB keyboard and a USB mouse, and you also have a USB microphone,

and you have a USB uh MP three player. All of those devices could plug into the exact same port as your as any of the others to your computer, unlike the old devices, which each had to have their own that's right, and um USB has another serious, serious advantage over those older technologies, which is it's hot swappable. And what that means is if you have a printer and uh, you want to plug it into your computer and turn it on. You can plug it into your

computer and turn it on. UM, I'll give you an example. I had most of you long time list. There's no that I used to be a Commodore Amiga owner. Jonathan's rolling his eyes. But what I used to use if I wanted to plug something in was called Scuzzy, which was an older technology, very fast. But UM, let me explain what I'd have to do. To say, if I wanted to to hook up a printer or um an

external DVD burner. Of course I didn't have those when I used my Amiga, but if I wanted to do that using the old interface, I'd have to turn my computer off and turn the peripheral off, plug it in, and make sure that there was a terminator plugged into the external port on the Scuzzy device, and then turn them on. Now, with USB, you can go ahead, plug in your your you know, iPod, you can plug in whatever,

your keyboard, mouse. You don't have to worry about whether or not it's gonna cause your computer to foul up, because it would using some of those older technologies. So this is very intuitive and and it's you know, you don't have to mess with it. You don't have to turn things off and worry about which one is in what order, and those there are problems that USB really made a difference in. It made it easier for manufacturers to come up with a single standard that they could

use for PCs and MAX both. Right, Yeah, it was actually a wonderful development. Um. When you when you plug something into a USB board or when you turn on a computer and things are already plugged into those ports, uh, the computer goes through a process called enumeration, and in enumeration, it it checks all the different ports and it assigns an address to each device that is connected to the computer.

And the same thing happens when you plug something in on the fly, and if the computer recognizes the device, it works right away. If it doesn't recognize the device, it might ask you for a driver, which you may have either on a disk or you may be able to download one off the web, and then you're ready to go. You can just plug it and play. That's

the common turn of phrase, I guess for that. But uh, the other neat thing, as you can connect way more devices to your computer than you could if you had to depend on you know, individual plugs and ports, right, that's right. In fact, um, you can include up to a D twenty seven with USB. That's a lot of devices. Now, um, those of you who are listening probably caught the fact that I said printer for the Amiga and that would actually have been on the parallel port. So don't write

in and tell me that. But say, um, say I did have a device I wanted to plug in via this, guys, report to Miamiga. See if you plug in a printer using USB on a modern computer PC or Mac, it's going to automatically assign, uh that a number from one to one seven, I guess um. On Miamiga, I would have had to have actually assigned a number on myself. So on the back of those devices there would be

a little counter. It looks like those counters that you hand holding your hand when somebody's walking through the turnstiles and you're actually doing a manual count. So whenever a girl winks at me and I hit the little and that thing, yeah, that's the one. Uh. It's actually it's actually very much like that though. It has that that digit counter. So you plug it in and you have to assign it a number yourself from one to eight. So here again USB hundred twenty seven versus very you know,

a manually assigned eight. So huge advantage. And I know what some of you are thinking. Some of you are thinking, how can I but Jonathan and Chris, my computer only has one or two USB ports? How could I possibly hook up as many as one and twenty seven devices? Well you couldn't directly, but if you used what we call hubs USB hubs, you could do that. In the hub essentially plugs into your computer and it divides that

connection into further ports. Most of them are like four ports hubs, and but you can get eight or even more. You can find some that that divided into into larger numbers. And by hooking hubs to hubs, you then increase, you know, the number of ports that you can plug things into. Plus, some peripherals like keyboards sometimes have additional USB ports on them, or monitors if you're using a desktop computer, a lot of monitors now have additional USB ports plug into them,

so you can use those. So yeah, just by by adding all these hubs you can you can connect tons and tons of devices to your computer. Uh. The other neat thing is that that that that devices can pull power from your computer. There are powered and unpowered devices. Uh the USB chord if you were to cut one open, don't do it, but if you were, you would find out that there are there was it. I think it's five wires in it or is it four? No, it's got it's got two wires for power and a twisted pair.

It's more added five more for USB three. That's why I'm saying that's the thing um about that is that they had to change the wiring. Yeah. But USB two, which is the common standard right now, there are four wires within the cable. Uh so yeah, you've got you've got a pair that provides the transfer of data and then you have a pair that that's for the power. So you've got a power in the ground essentially. Um

so the power right, and it's five volts. I know that five volts of power for USB two point oh and uh so yeah, you can you can actually power your devices. You can charge them through your computer. Um they're actually drawing power from your computer to the device. And uh and so you can get hubs that are

powered as well. Um, where you would actually plug the hub in so that way you don't you know, overload your computer with a hundred twenty seven devices all trying to pull power from your poor little laptop or whatever you're using. Yeah, it depends on it depends on what you're doing. If you're plugging in a mouse, Um, it's going to draw a power from the computer. But if you're plugging in something more substantial, say a printer, that's not gonna be able to pull the power from the computer.

It's going to need its own power. Now, in the case of a a printer, it's got its own power supply. You you plug it into the wall. But what say you have you know you're you're gonna work in garage, band or something else where you want to plug in a keyboard electronic music keyboard, not a typing keyboard. Um, you're gonna need another source of power. And if you have a powered hub that can that can help out

with some of those sort of in between uh peripherals. Yeah, and um let's see what else can we talk about USB before we move on to FireWire and then USB three point Well, I was going to talk about how how far you can get away because USB cable can be about five meters from the source. Right, you can extend that a power to hub has that used too, because uh it can extend up to UM up to thirty meters away. Okay. And also we should point out, like we mentioned before, the computer acts as a host,

so each device is ultimately connecting directly to the computer. UH. That's important for us to to note because even though the hub might provide a node or whatever you know, connect a further connection, but ultimately the device is interacting directly with the computer, not with other devices that are on your UM uh that are hooked up through the USB ports. That's important to note because when we talk about FireWire, things change, it's different. Um. But we should

also talk about the speeds. That's true. I was going to say, this is the part at which we actually address the guts of the question. Right. So USB one point one when that came out, the speed of data transfer was around twelve megabits per second. Right, it's got two modes one point five and twelve megabits per second, pretty fast. But USB two point oh was four hundred eighty megabits per second, which is even faster, much faster now between USB one point one in USB two point

oh that's when we saw the introduction of FireWire. That's true, Can I mention one more thing? Go ahead? Okay, So the other the other part of of this, and it sort of ties back into the hubs. I've got a USB one point one hub that I got from my very first iMac, and I have a brand new iMac that I got last fall. Well, now I don't have

to replace that hub. But when I plug that hub into my computer and then I try to plug something else that has USB two as the standard, my computer immediately goes, hey, you know, since this is a one point one hub, I can't send for eighty megabits per second down this line. Are you sure you really want

to do that? See, it works fine, It will transfer data fine, just at the speeds of one point one as opposed to point out exactly so, if you were going to try to plug in your iPod and sink it with your computer, it's not going to be able to transfer songs, movies, etcetera. Nearly as fast if you're throttling it by putting it through a one point one hub. But that's that's basically the difference. It doesn't render it inoperable,

It just slows it right, it's it's backward compatible. So USB two point oh will work with USB one point one UM devices or cables, whatever, whichever one you're looking at. So if you've got a device that has that only works on USB one point one and you plug it into a port that's USB two point oh, you should still be okay, You're just gonna be going at that lower speed. Um. You know, for for it to go at the higher speed, everything needs to be ready, you know,

capable of performing at the highest of the standards. So technically, right now, we could say that's USB three point oh, although you aren't going to find a lot of devices and or computers that can do that right now. But if you did have a USB three point oh capable computer chord and device, then you could transfer at the top speed. And you wanted to talk to talk about FireWire, which was actually in development around the same time as

USB and supposed to be a solution to the same problem. Right, So we're talking. You know, there's certain devices that tend to create very large files that you may want to transfer to a computer at some point, and the obvious example of that is a camera, like exactly, so you're taking these pictures or you're taking video and this. These tend to generate very large file sizes and it could take a very long time to transfer if you're you know, if you have to do it through normal cables. So

FireWire was one of those solutions. And UM, I believe Apple was behind the development of that, wasn't it. That's true, But they weren't alone. They had other people in there with him, including IBM. There you go. Um So, from from what I read anyway, so USB one point one comes out, that's one of the possible solutions to this problem.

FireWire comes out shortly thereafter. FireWire had much faster speed than um us BE one point one, so we're looking at twelve megabits per second at the top speed for one point one. FireWire four hundred which was the first one to come out, and that was four hundred megabits per second. Wow, how aptly named? Yes, how do you what do you know? FireWire four hundred, um and FireWire shared a lot of other similarities with the USB. You could you could hook up many different devices to a computer,

not as many as USB. USB was a D twenty seven, FireWire was sixty three. Another big difference is that unlike USB, where you had where each device was ultimately hooked to a computer, and FireWire you could hook to fireware devices to each other. And so it's the difference between a a host and client relationship and appear to peer relationship.

So whereas you you could think of M A A, let's think of a think about like a USB hub as a bunch of spokes that all ultimately end at the computer on one end and on a device on the other end. Okay, so FireWire you could actually daisy chain the devices. You could hook one device to another and then with a second cable, hook that device to a third device, and then hook that device to say a computer, and all of these could transfer data back and forth, so you didn't have to have a whole

bunch of direct connections going to the computer. That's another one of the big differences. UM and uh there. The cable was also slightly different. UM. It had six wires in it instead of four the FireWire cable had. UM had two for power and two twisted pair sets for data transfers instead of just the single twisted pair set for the USB had UM. So this was Apple really pushed this. This and put it in a lot of their products for a really long time, and then until

just recently they started to kind of back off of it. Well, they still have it available on on a lot of the high end computers, but they're sort of backing off. And although they did come out with a second version of that called um, you know, you're never gonna get this FireWire eight. Wait, let me guess how fast it went? Eight hundred megabits per second. I can't put anything past you, yea,

So yes, you know it's it's it's very efficient. Um, slightly different, the connector is a little different, but it is it does work essentially the same way and you know, just faster. So yeah, let's sea if we're looking at the timeline. Then USB one point one comes out, FireWire four hunter comes out, blows away the speed for USB one point one. USB two point oh comes out. It's actually a little faster than FireWire. FireWire a hundred comes out, and it's almost twice as fast as USB two point oh.

So for competition, yeah, but then again, at this point you're dealing with USB and FireWire versus serial parallel, Scuzzy A d B, you know, all those other ports so now we're just down to two connectors, which is much nicer. Yeah, and really when you look at most computers, you're really done to one connector pretty much now because USB has essentially one this this format battle UM all but one it.

I mean, there's still people who who work in video UM that prefer FireWire because a lot of video cameras that that's that's the the format they use. Well, Sony was a big proponent of it, but of course Apple owned the FireWire names, so Sony used eyelink or I got link um, you know, and a lot of other people called it by its standard name, which the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers actually they use I triple

E says it on the website. But yeah, I E. If you see that, that's FireWire, so um Yeah, very very popular with UM with video camera enthusiasts. But yeah, I think I think things are moving towards USB only or even Bluetooth. Now. There's still there's still some development on the FireWire front. I know that there there's a push to to pull out another yet another new standard for FireWire, which I think would transferred data an excess of six gigabits per second. That's funny. You should mention

six gigabits this. Other people are are doing that too. Yeah, yeah, like, Um, the E S A T A transfer standard. Um, it's it's less popular than the other two, but it is probably the the last of the holdouts, I guess. Of course S A T A is a popular standard for internally mounting components on a computer. Um, but there is an external connector and you see you do see that on some pecs in different places. Um, but that the current standard for UH for S A T A is

six gigabit per second. But USB three is approaching that. Yeah, it's not quite it's not. It's in four point eight gigabits per second, which if you look at the USB two point oh, that's ten times faster. I was going to say that falls into the nothing to sneeze at category. Yes, yes, if you were to sneeze it that you should be

reprimanded exactly, for it is nothing to sneeze at. Yes, the USB three point oh sometimes people call it USB superspeed, And um, they've added five line, as I was saying earlier when I was fumbling around thinking was it four? Was it five? But they're not all copper anymore. No, there's fiber optics, and uh yeah, we're looking at UM we're looking at the potential for devices to be able to move data very very quickly. UM. Still, it's still

one of those device host arrangements. The thing I like about FireWire is the idea of being able to share information between two separate devices without even bringing a computer into the picture. UM. I really do like that that capability. I don't tend to use anything that has FireWire in it. I just happened to think that's a that's a neat ability to have, UM, as opposed to having to use

a computer as the middleman for all of your data transfers. UM. But I do think that USB has become pretty much the de facto standard across the industry, and so USB three point has got a good chance of being the standard for high speed data transfers between devices and your computers. So I'm looking forward to our USB overlords. UM. I'm sure I'll be using plenty of devices that use that standard. So I'm gonna hit you with a question that you

probably weren't expecting. How good, So I assume that USB three point I will be backward compatible. Also and that you will be able to use your USB one point one or USB two hub if you want to, or you know, it's just gonna be slow. I know the connectors are a little different. So I'm not entirely sure that you could plug a USB three chord. You haven't. No, they're pretty. Oh they're not pretty. It's a chord, it's a cable. Actually, the ones I saw were blue. Um. Yeah,

they had some at ces um. Yeah. I you know, I didn't take a good close enough look. I don't. I'm not entirely certain that you would be able to to plug a USB three chord into a non USB three device. However, I do think it's backwards compatible in the sense that you could use a USB two chord to connect your computer to a device. It just would

move data at the USB two speed. Um. So yeah, if you had the if you had a USB two chord and a USB two device, you could they you could plug it into your computer to a USB three chord. You're gonna need a USB three device because the end that plugs into your device is going to be different. Okay, Yeah, was that the question or were you leading up to something. It's like, well, you know, all right, now hit me with your question. I had a Mexican for lunch in

case that was another question, Just in case. That's all I've got. That's all you got. Awesome, fantastic. That's all I've got to except um, oh, well, you know, there's one other thing we could talk about very briefly. There's one other standard that's in development that we may see or we may never see, which is why or less USB, which I find to be sort of oxymoronic. Yeah, kind of um. And and from what I understand, most of the wireless USB, it's and we're talking about ultra short

range data transfers um and shorter than Bluetooth, shorter than YEA. Yeah, we're talking about really close to to whatever devices. And here's the other thing about wireless USB. There's one important component of USB that you cannot achieve wirelessly as of right now. The plug. How would be it? The power? Because um, even Tesla has not figured out how to do that. Um. Yeah, broadcasting power back and forth between your device and the computer is not not really possible

right now. So, um, that part of the USB equation is null and void when you're talking about wireless us B. So if you had a wireless USB mouse, you'd have to have some kind of battery power going on in

the mouse in order for you to use that device. Yeah, yeah, And I mean I've I've got a wireless I've got a wireless mouse, but it's not a USB mouse, so and of course it has the as a docking station sort of thing that actually plugs into the computer, so it's not yeah, kind of like a dongle, dongle the French called dongle um. But yeah, that's that's that. I hope that answers your question, Leanna. The really, when you're looking at USB, you're just looking at moving data back

and forth between devices and computers. You shouldn't need any sort of adapter. I mean, if you are using an old hub that's plugged into your computer and you're you realize that it's taking a really long time to move data, it might be time to buy a new hub, because it may be that the hub you've got is a USB one point one and that would be the problem. But if you know, as as long as everything is that USB two point oh, then you know you're gonna

you're gonna move at pretty good speeds. There you go. So this. Um, this brings us round to uh our second bout of listener made oh man, So this comes from Jesse. Hey, guys, I just wanted to say, while I love the last podcast technology we can thank NASA for, I must admit that I was very disappointed at the list of inventions. While many of these are great ideas and benefit mankind in a nonchalant way, I found I

was eager to hear about great world changing advances. Unfortunately, the hype climax somewhere near the mention of a space pen. Although extremely entertaining, if I am maybe cliche, it isn't the sort of thing it takes a rocket scientist to figure out. Anyways, Thanks for the entertaining podcast. Well, Jesse, Um, we thought about this, and you know, we were really looking at different technologies that benefit us on a day to day basis and the kind of things that you know,

we might not have if we didn't have NASA. But if you want something that's really world changing, how about a ship that can take a man to the a freaking moon. That sounds pretty advanced. Yeah, yeah, that would be a big one, I would say, UM, lots of other ones big The communication satellites. We actually mentioned that. And the ship that can launch and then return like a plane. Yeah, another big one. Um. Yeah, there's some there's some pretty decent inventions masses made that have been

world changing. Um and you know who who Who's to say that the smaller quote unquote inventions haven't changed the world in some fundamental way. We wouldn't know unless we were able to look in on a world that did not have those inventions, now would we? And I have one of those inventions, but I'm not sharing it with the rest of you. Ha ha ha. So if any of you want to be mocked by tech stuff, please write to tex Stuff at how stuff works dot com.

Uh no, we won't really mock you. And Jesse, that was a good question, so we appreciate it, and that's true. They were. They were pretty ubiquitous, normal everyday things. But I thought that was kind of cool that they had to invent all those things. But if you got point, if you want to learn more about the USB or FireWire technologies, we have articles on that at how stuff works dot com. And we will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics.

Is it how stuff works dot com, and be sure to check out the new tech stuff blogs now on the How Stuff Works homepage, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you