Some are designed as Firewire to USB cables. Thus, the most common use case for an adapter is to connect a Firewire device to a USB port.Īdapters are typically dongles, small devices with a short wire that plugs into the USB port and an integrated Firewire port. It is significantly more likely for a computer to have USB ports and potentially Thunderbolt ports than it is to have a Firewire port. USB has enjoyed significantly wider adoption than Firewire. Both technologies support Plug-and-Play and hot-plugging (hot-swappable). If you cannot purchase a Firewire® to USB adapter, using a hub allows you to use devices that are compatible with either technology. The combination hub is actually two separate ports combined into a single form factor for convenience there is no conversion between Firewire® and USB taking place when you use one of these hubs. This type of device has two ports in a single hub, which may be either external or internal one port is used Firewire® and one for USB, allowing either type of device to function. A Firewire® to USB adapter cable for transferring digital video (DV) is available from at least one manufacturer, but it can be expensive and difficult to find.Ī USB cable to the left of two Firewire® cables.Įven if you don't have a Firewire® to USB adapter cable, it doesn't mean that your Firewire® devices are useless if you have a USB port, or vice versa. The two technologies are not integrated, meaning it is not possible to connect a USB device to a Firewire® port directly.
#Firewire 800 to usb 3 connector serial#
Though the USB interface could daisy chain up to 127 devices, their transfer speed of 12 Mbps was not as good as FireWire.Firewire® ( IEEE 1394) and USB (Universal Serial Bus) are two separate high-speed bus technologies that allow multiple devices to be connected to a computer. TDM made data transfer a quick, easy, and relatively reliable process.Īnother factor that worked in favor of FireWire was it ability to daisy chain up to 63 devices, with a guaranteed data transfer speed of 400 Mbps. This eliminated the need of third-party devices for data transfers and networks for data sharing. FireWire also provided a facility called ‘Target Disk Mode’ (TDM) – a provision where using FireWire connectivity, two computers could interact, but as external devices to each other. FireWire to USB AdaptersįireWire ports were different from USB ports in the sense that FireWire supported audio and video transfer alongside data transfer. In January 2013, it was announced that USB 3.0 would be further bolstered to increase its transfer speed up to 10 Gigabits/second, to put it on par with Apple’s Thunderbolt.
USB 3.0 was launched in 2008 with transfer capabilities of 625 Megabytes/second. The USB standard was overhauled and improvised sometime around the turn of the millennium, and Intel called the new standard USB 2.0. USB was designed with the purpose of standardizing connecting of external peripherals. Intel, along with DEC, IBM, Microsoft, NEC and Nortel, started working on the Universal Serial Bus standard. This would make manufacturing easier and cheaper and from the user point of view, this made connecting devices and transferring data a lot less tedious. Sometime around the mid-nineties, many companies realized the need for a universal and easier-to-connect port for all devices, instead of incorporating an array of different ports for different devices.