Prepared by Ian Matthews July 14, 2010
If you are like me you probably have to go looking for the exact specifications for external connectors like USB and Firewire every few months. For some reason, I have been unable to find a simple table that contains the core information for each product and version… so I did the research and made one:
| USB 1.1 | USB 2 HiSpeed USB | USB 3 | Firewire1 FW400 1394 | Firewire2 FW800 1394B | Firewire4 FW3200 1394D | eSATA I eSATA | eSATAw/Pwr . eSATAp | eSATA II eSATA 6GB | |
| Speed | .012GB/sec | .48GB/sec | 5GB/Sec | .4GB/Sec | .8GB/Sec | 3.2GB/Sec | 3GB/Sec | 3GB/Sec | 6GB/Sec |
| Full Duplex | No | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Supply Power | Yes | Yes | Yes | Possible | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | ? |
| Power Mgt | No | No | Yes | No | ? | ? | No | No | ? |
| Cable Length | 3M | 5M | 3M For Super Speed | 4.5M | 4.5M 300′ if Cat5 | ? | 2M | 2M | ? |
| Hot Plugging | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | OS & Hardwr Specific | OS & Hardware Specific | ? |
| Product Availabilitiy in 2010 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ? – Apple Has Dropped support | Yes | Yes | 2011 |
External Devices
This chart is a little smushed so if you want to see a clean version, click on this one:
Note that Apple recently dropped support for Firewire so I suspect we will be left with USB 3 and eSATA 6GB as the only common options for 2011 and 2012.
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