Pros and Cons
FireWire has found a home in consumer electronics thanks to its use of a peer-to-peer architecture for connecting devices to each other. That means you can attach a camcorder directly to a digital television without a PC in the middle orchestrating the whole process. FireWire no longer has a significant speed advantage over USB, which is now fast enough to handle devices that transfer relatively large amounts of data, such as hard drives and DVD recorders. But we found in side-by-side testing that FireWire still has a quality edge with streaming audio and video.
Equipped for isochronous data transfer, FireWire can guarantee that a given audio or video stream receives a fixed amount of bandwidth from start to finish. USB also can do isochronous transfers, but until the creation of USB 2.0, it was simply too slow for streaming audio, turning peripherals manufacturers to FireWire from the start. In the PC market, USB is more popular than FireWire, partly because it is less expensive. With USB, full chipset support is found in all the latest mainstream PCs. By contrast, FireWire requires an I/0 card, or, if support for the protocol is built into a chipset (as it is in the nVidia nForce2 graphics chipset), the motherboard still requires additional circuitry.