USB and Firewire are two competing standards used for Memory Sticks, Digital Cameras, Mice, Keyboards, Scanners and Printers to name a few.

Apple originally created the Firewire standard and Intel the USB standard. USB is far more common and mainstream, however both standards come in three different speeds.

USB operates at 11Mbps, USB 2.0 (commonly named High Speed USB) operates at 480Mbps and USB 3.0 at 4.8Gbps or 4800Mbps.

Firewire IEEE 1394 operates at 400Mbps, IEEE 1394b operates at 800Mbps and Firewire S1600/S3200 at 1.6Gbps and 3.2Gbps respectively.

Both standards are hot-swappable and both of the faster standards are backward compatible with slower devices. Both standards can also be used to create small networks, however Ethernet is still very cost effective and preferable with Gigabit speeds (1000Mbps).

So which is the better standard?

It’s difficult to say which is the better standard, however USB is more common, with as many as 10 USB ports mounted on the latest motherboards, replacing PS/2, Serial and Parallel connections altogether. Firewire ports are also found on newer motherboards, but normally one or two ports at the most. Technically (on paper) USB 3.0 is the quicker standard, so some would say is better, however in practice due to limitations of the PCI bus and hard disks themselves, you’ll notice very little difference in speed between the two standards.

At the time of writing, with USB 3.0 and Firewire S3200 on the horizon, PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) and SATA 3.0 (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) hard disks capable of 6Gbps will play a big role in delivering high speed transfer rates.