Just when you thought that connecting peripherals to your PC had settled down, here come two more options for you to consider. And since both options look almost identical (if you climb up to 10,000 feet and look down at them), this just adds to the confusion.
A little history: USB 1.1 was the first major breakthrough in peripheral attachment since the original IBM PC back in 1982. When the IBM engineers designed the IBM PC, they knew that external peripheral equipment would have to be attached. In some cases, there were already some standards for how these devices plugged in. In other cases, they were in quite a rush and so just set their own standard.
Also considered important at the time was ease of use. It made sense at that time to have each type of peripheral connect to the PC using a different type of connector. Thus, you couldn't make a mistake plugging the peripheral device in.
Instead, this lead to the terrible clutter of cables at the back of the average PC. In addition, those interfaces could not be shared. For example, you cannot share a parallel printer port. Some devices, such as scanners, do in fact do this, but in a way that often does not work properly. You could also not unplug a device at any time.
USB 1.1 was the answer. It used simple cable connections and much smaller wires. You could have just one USB cable coming out of the back of your PC, going to all of your peripherals by means of an external hub or hubs. USB devices were "hot plug", meaning that you could plug and unplug them at any time. Almost all peripheral devices today use USB, and the old "legacy" ports will rapidly be disappearing from new PCs.
But USB was optimized for low speed devices, such as keyboards and mice. It didn't have the raw bandwidth needed for some of today's peripherals, especially video cameras. Although USB 1.1 could theoretically do 10Mb/s (megabits per second), in practicality you were lucky to get about 4Mb/s.
Along came FireWire, or IEEE 1394. FireWire actually predated USB, but was never popular in the PC world until digital video camera manufacturers (primarily Sony) needed a higher speed interface for their cameras. But to confuse things, USB2 has now come along, which has speeds just about equivalent to FireWire. So, what do you get?
The answer is: both. You will find that some new devices use USB 2.0, some use FireWire and some use both. I recommend that you equip your PC with both interfaces and then are free to purchase the device you want. PCs are now coming out with USB2 built-in, and some are also coming out with FireWire - especially some notebook PCs. But if you don't have either, it's simple to get them. Plug in cards are available for either interface or both. If your PC is short on slots, a combo card is just what you need.
As I mentioned above, they are fairly similar. But there are some differences. USB cables are the same for all devices; FireWire has two connector types - a smaller one with 4 wires and a bigger one with 6 wires. The difference is that you need a 6-wire cable if you are going to provide power for the device directly from the interface. Get the right type of cable for the device.
USB devices use a hub topology - you can connect devices to a hub to add more devices. FireWire devices can use both hubs and also can be daisy-chained. One major disadvantage of the daisy-chain connection is that if you break the chain, all of the devices cease to function - this is not true in a hub.
So the message here is that you should buy the device you want for its other attributes, and then get a USB2, FireWire, or combo card as needed.
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport / Oak Island area. You can visit his website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail him at bsc@bobseidel.com).