Firewire 400 vs. USB2

Question

Is USB2 better than Firewire400?
When I look at a harddrive from LaCie, the specs says this:
FireWire 400: up to 400Mbits/s (50MB/s)
Hi-Speed USB 2.0: up to 480Mbits/s (60MB/s)
Dos that mean that USB2 always is better than Firewire400, or are there other aspects?

Answer 1

Jakob Rink wrote:
Is USB2 better than Firewire400?
When I look at a harddrive from LaCie, the specs says this:
FireWire 400: up to 400Mbits/s (50MB/s)
Hi-Speed USB 2.0: up to 480Mbits/s (60MB/s)
Dos that mean that USB2 always is better than Firewire400, or are there other aspects?
Those are theoretical raw data transfer rates. Remember that you might have multiple devices on the same node, and many of those devices operate at a slower speed. Only one device communicates at any given instance. USB also has a lot of overhead and negotations to control a device on the bus are performed at a slower rate for compatibility with 12 Mbit/sec (and 1.5 Mbit/sec) devices.
In reality, a single FireWire 400 device will have a higher throughput than a single USB Hi-Speed device (without other devices on the same node). If you read a LaCie spec for actual data transfer rate and not just raw bus speed, you'll see that FireWire 400 is faster. It's also less prone to other devices slowing it down. This was from the specifications for the LaCie Big Disk Extreme+ Triple:
http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=10922
Burst Transfer Rate1 (max. drive speed) :
FireWire 800: up to 80-90MB/s
FireWire 400: up to 35-40MB/s
USB 2.0: up to 30-34MB/s
So the translation into Mbit/sec is up to 320 Mbit/sec for FireWire 400, and up to 272 Mbit/sec for USB 2.0.