FireWire vs. USB

A week or so ago a student approached the desk looking for help to connect one of the center’s hard drives to a Mac she was using. She had the hard drive connected to the computer using a USB cable from the kit, but there was no recognition of it by the computer. I played around with it and the cable to make sure everything was intact and working as it should be, I tried different USB ports, but nothing seemed to work. Eventually, according to the advice of Dianna, we tried the FireWire cable and with it everything worked perfectly; the computer recognized the device and the student was able to download the video file she had saved on the hard drive.

As Dianna explained to me, generally USB connections should only be used as a last resort for computers that have no other options, as they lack several abilities that other connections offer. To me, without too much experience with digital audio or video and obviously using USB connections very regularly, this was somewhat counter-intuitive. But after looking into it some more on my own I will confidently be using FireWire over USB connections whenever possible from now on. Here’s a good article I found outlining the pros and cons of FireWire versus USB connections: http://support.presonus.com/entries/21355765-Should-I-choose-a-FireWire-or-USB-audio-interface-