USB doesn't handle isochronous data.
--------
Jeff's right. Or to put it in layman's terms, Firewire comes a lot closer to reaching the theoretical max throughput of 50Mb/s than does USB2.
You can think of USB and USB2 as decendents of Apple's ADB. They're great for keyboards, mice, and low throughput devices, but they'll always be lousy for high throughput devices, especially ones that require precise timing. It's really the wrong tool for the job, and no matter how much you hot rod it, it's going to suffer from it's basic design philosphy. Sure, you can hotrod a dumptruck to run fast, but it's never going to make a descent Grand Prix car. Likewise, you can modify a Ferrari F1 car to haul rocks, but it's never going to do the job as well as a stock dump truck.
Firewire, on the otherhand, is the spiritual descendant of SCSI. I read on storagereview.com that Firewire is actually part of the SCSI-3 standard (or something like that). One way to think of Firewire is as "UltraSuperDuper Narrow Fast SCSI-3".
-Matt |
