At 9:06 AM -0700 6/13/2010, Manuel Marques wrote:
cheap set of USB adapters, and was surprised to find one that has a
USB female plug in one end and a standard FireWire 400 port in the
other.
These are a PITA necessity now that Apple has dropped FW from some machines.
The adapter is so small that I really can't imagine what kind of
electronics is hidden there! I always thought Firewire required a
special controller, and that's why Firewire devices were more
expensive than their USB counterparts.
A real firewire controller does the i/o work for the CPU. The
protocol's low overhead, plus the work done in the controller, are
the reason for FW's blazing throughput. USB is designed to be a
cheap dumb interface - making the main CPU do most of the work. The
adapter converts the signals but does no processing. That's up to
your USB driver and the machine's main CPU to do.
I can post links to some images of the adapter, but I wanted to know
your opinion prior to plugging something to it. Will it blow up? :)
It should be fine. Just don't expect full firewire performance from it.
And I believe the Adapter counts as a "device", so it pulls a "unit"
of power. This can be problematic with some peripherals that want to
leech power from the bus -- USB has much less power available than
FW. If this is a problem, you'll get a dialog complaining. If it's
a serious / electrical problem, OS X will shut off the interface
(reboot to restore it). A powered hub will usually fix things.
HTH,
- Dan.
--
- Psychoceramic Emeritus; South Jersey, USA, Earth.
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