Question about USB and FireWire

I have a USB 2.0 external hard drive and I was just wondering if it would still work if I used a firewire cable instead. If it does work i figure it would give me faster transfer speeds, but I am just not sure if the driver would be compatible with firewire. Thanks

 

does your external hard drive have a firewire socket? if no then its not going to work

 

isnt the firewire and usb sockets the same mini type B?

 

personally i've never used firewire, but, USB2 & firewire work very differently, i don't actually know if firewire cables can be used with USB devices but USB3 is due out in the first half of this new year & has a transfer rate of 4.8Gbits/s (about 10 times faster than USB2) but devices won't be available until about 2k9 / 2k10

 

Yeah...Donkey's right. Just look at the differences in supplied voltages! (FireWire 30v, USB 5v...ish

 

thankies Tech, but, i was referring to:

• USB networks use a star topology, but FireWire uses a repeater based topology.
• USB uses a "speak-when-spoken-to" protocol & peripherals cannot communicate with the host unless the host specifically requests communication. A FireWire device can communicate with any other device at any time, subject to network conditions.

Edited Source

BTW: thanks anyway

 

ah ok thanks for the info everyone