Someone at one point ask me of this question on these peripheral devices, mainly what's the differences and which one should I get. Let me give the highlights to similarities and differences so you can decide what is best for yourself.
In general, most of us utilized USB 2.0 devices which is the successor of USB 1.1. USB stands for Universal Serial Bus which in my opinion is much more common than Firewire. Perhaps the marketing for the firewire is less agressive or the general public are less familiar with Firewire. Firewire are for geeks anyway, not the normal public users.
Alright, let me explain the similarities, both USB and Firewire connects to your motherboard either build in or through serial bus. Secondly, USB and Firewall supports hot swap meaning you can unplug and plug in devices without having to restart your computer. Thirdly, they are backward compatible devices with previous version. As I mentioned earlier, USB is at version 2.0 and Firewire is at 800; translation, USB 2.0 can hand 480Mbps versus the 800Mbps (predecessor is 400).
The differences, Firewire kicks the USB butt when working on a single device, it can sustain transfer speed of at least 41MBps. Just like I mentioned, if working on single devices, but if multiple devices hangs on, speed will go down for Firewire. The USB on the other hand is build with a Master & Slave concept, which means that it is capable of managing data priorities as needed. Second difference is that USB can host up to 127 devices if you joined a couple of USB hubs together (max @ 5 hub level) and the Firewire is limited at 63 devices. Third differences is the distance between the two, USB can go as far as 80 ft versus the Firewire (Firewire 800 only) can go as far as 1000ft with a repeater. If you are thinking why can you use a repeater for USB, well the technology is not there for USB.
I would recommend to use Firewire for high speed data transfer and video, for the rest, go with USB. Hope this note helps.
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