USB & Firewire

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Joined
5 Oct 2003
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395
Hi all

Firstly, could someone recommend a decent (in form and function) USB hub for my iMac?

Also, I'm a little unsure about how firewire works - if I have a lot of firewire devices will they all share the available bandwidth between them? I guess I'm asking this because I dont want my firewire 800 drive's transfer to be limited by other devices. Is this even a problem or is there more than enough bandwidth anyway?

Thanks very much!
 
Soldato
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I'd also like someone to spec me a good usb hub for the imac. 3 ports is not enough.


I have my printer, my universal dock and my blu-ray player connected by usb. If I want to use a pendrive or plug in a controller or external hard drive, then I have to go around the back. :(
 
Soldato
Joined
13 Jan 2003
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Firewire is basically a serial bus where you daisy chain the devices. Apple's firewire drivers are very fast.

With my WD MyStudio 1TB (just one drive) the interfaces perform in the following order of fastest first: FW800 > eSATA > FW400 > USB2.0.

I was getting a sustained sequential write of 50MB/sec when formatting it over FW800 so I don't think you'll see much of an impact on the drive!
 
Soldato
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Firewire is basically a serial based successor to SCSI (for those old enough to remember it!). So it's great for scanners, hard drives and video etc.

The devices are intelligent and get on with communicating between themselves leaving the CPU more time to do useful stuff. Copy between devices and they just talk to each other.

USB being designed for keyboards and webcams and the like needs CPU supervision for everything, hence why FW400 gives USB2 a sound thrashing.
 
Soldato
Joined
5 Feb 2006
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Location
15,000ft.
Id be interested in a good USB Hub too actually if anyone knows of one?

Found one. I'm not sure if I can link it tho. It's on the apple store and a competitor store that rhymes with gay.

It's a kensington pocked USB hub, 4 port and has an ac adapter so it's powered too.

It's gray with a black front and suites the aluminum imacs great. :D
 
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