Apple does a better job on their FireWire page where they compare FireWire 800 to USB 2.0 as well as FireWire 400. Apple's USB page adds to the confusion by calling USB 1.1 (12Mbps) 'High Speed.' Both are wrong. There are expressions tossed around like 'Full Speed' and 'High Speed' or 'Hi-Speed.' According to, some vendors who call their USB 1.1 products 'Full Speed USB' to make them sound faster than 12 megaBITS per second - but that's misleading at best. There's some confusion about USB terminology. There's something seriously inefficient going on in the I/O 'guts' of the G5! It's pretty sad when the 'world's fastest personal computer' gets beat by the eMac running at a fraction of the clock speed and costing a fraction of the price.ģ.

And as we've seen before, the G5 was slower than the PowerBook in the FireWire 800 WRITE test. The G5 was slower than the eMac in the sustained WRITE speed tests - that includes USB 2.0 and FireWire 400. The G5 posted sustained WRITE speeds SLOWER than the much cheaper eMac! Take a good look at the 'WRITE' graph above. Then we reformatted the drive in NTFS when I moved the drive to the Windows PC.Ģ. NOTE: We formatted the test drive as 'Mac OS Extended' or HFS+ when testing on the Mac. We measured 33MB/s READ and 27MB/s WRITE. Today we tested the same USB 2.0 drive/enclosure on a Windows PC (3GHz Pentium 4) with built-in USB 2.0 on the motherboard, similar to Apple's approach. The Windows PC implementation of USB 2.0 puts the Mac to shame. Some blame it on Apple's USB 2.0 drivers or the USB 2.0 bridge chips.

You can't blame it on the drive, because, as you can see from the FireWire 800 tests, the drive is capable of transfer rates much higher. FireWire 400 is rated at 400 megaBITS per second (50 megaBYTES per second) - 80 megaBITS slower rating than USB 2.0 - yet when exact same drive/enclosure is plugged into the FireWire 400 port, it goes almost twice as fast! The most we saw was 144 megaBITS per second or 18 megaBYTES per second. Apple states that the USB 2.0 ports on their Macs support transfer rates up to 480 megaBITS per second (Mbps), which translates to 60 megaBYTES per second (MB/s). USB 2.0 is much slower than FireWire 400 and 800.

Usb 2 vs usb 3 speed megabytes