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-- About Firewire Cables --

Firewire is another term for the IEEE 1394 interface. IEEE 1394 has been around for many years and has a few different versions available to the consumer. The IEEE 1394 versions are: Firewire 400, Firewire 800, and Firewire S800T. Firewire is an alternative to USB in many media and storage applications. Firewire 800 offers a maximum transfer rate almost double what USB 2.0 offers. Firewire S800T is a new port specification which offers Firewire over the same connectors that Category 5e cable use as specified in IEEE 802.3 clause 40. Firewire S800T is not widely used. The most commonly used of the three is the Firewire 800, especially with Apple products. The name Firewire was coined by Apple Inc.

What does a Firewire cable look like?

Advanced Information

• "The FireWire host interface supports memory-mapped devices, allowing high-level protocols to run without loading the host CPU with interrupts and buffer-copy operations. It should also be noted that Firewire features two data busses for each segment of the bus network whereas USB only features one. This means that Firewire can have communication in both directions at the same time, but with USB communication can only occur in one direction at any one time."
• "In real world tests USB PC hosts rarely can sustain transfers exceeding 280 Mbit/s, with 240 Mbit/s being the norm. This is likely due to USB's reliance on the host processor to manage low-level USB protocol, whereas FireWire delegates the same tasks to the interface hardware (requiring less or no CPU usage)."
• "FireWire can be used for ad-hoc (terminals only, no routers except where a FireWire hub is used) computer networks. Specifically, RFC 2734 specifies how to run IPv4 over the FireWire interface, and RFC 3146 specifies how to run IPv6."

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Wikipedia was used as a source for this information. Thank you to all those who contributed to it.