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Firewire??

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Topic Firewire??
once again, this may seem like a stuipid question, but i'm extremely new to this. what is a firewire port??
2
Firewire is an external hardware serial bus protocol originally developed by Apple and has since been adopted as a hardware standard called IEEE 1394. Since it is now a standard, a lot of pc's as well as macs have integrated the protocol into their motherboards, as well as peripheral cards and devices. Firewire is merely the name trademarked by Apple for the technology.

Most motherboards now being released for the pc now have onboard firewire ports capable of 400 Mbs, the newer IEEE 1394b (called Firewire 800 by Apple) standard ups the data rate to 800 Mbs - Gigabyte mobos seem to be the only pc mobos with 1394b while Power Mac G5's have 1 Firewire 800 port and 2 Firewire 400. USB is another serial protocol also originally adopted by Apple in their early IMacs; both Firewire and USB were developed for Plug-and-play functionality.
3
ahhh, I see. but you said it is apple's version of a usb? does that mean you can only find it on mac's? the reason i ask is because I am in process of setting up a home studio and i've noticed that a lot of equipment says it requires firewire ports. so does that mean i have to have a mac if i want to use this equipment?
4
A firewire port is Apple's version of USB, with some differences. Firewire is often used in video cameras and audio equipemnt because it comes in two speeds: Firewire 400 and Firewire 800. Firewire 400 is 400megabits per second, while USB 2.0 is 480mbps. The reason Firewire 400 is faster than USB 2.0 is because it allows more threads of data to pass through it. If you envision it as a pipeline, it is much wider than USB 2.0, allowing more data through quickly. What this means to us audio users is that we can record more streams of audio simontainously with Firewire than USB 2.0. With USB you can only record up to 6 tracks at the same time, while with firewire, I believe you can record 16.

Firewire 800 blows both of them out of the water, it just doubles the speed of Firewire 400.

http://www.barefeats.com/usb2.html