Chapter 3: Port-o-Rama: Using Thunderbolt, USB, and FireWire

In This Chapter

Using FireWire, USB, and Thunderbolt with OS X

Adding a USB or FireWire hub

Troubleshooting external connections

Adding and updating drivers

Apple’s list of successes continues to grow over the years — hardware, applications, and (of course) OS X — but the FireWire standard for connecting computers to all sorts of different devices is in a class by itself. For many years, FireWire was the port of choice for all sorts of digital devices that needed a high-speed connection.

And let us not forget that Apple was the first major computer manufacturer to include Intel’s Universal Serial Bus (or USB) ports as standard equipment — and, recently, the Thunderbolt external port (providing the fastest connection speed ever to an external device) made its debut on the MacBook Pro!

In this chapter, I discuss the importance of all three of these connections to the digital hub that I discuss in Book III, and I compare FireWire with Thunderbolt, USB version 2.0, and USB version 3.0 connection technology. I also talk troubleshooting and expansion using a hub.

Appreciating the Advantage of a FireWire Connection

So what’s so special about FireWire, anyway? Why does Apple stuff at least one FireWire port in almost every current Macintosh model? (The exceptions are the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models.) Heck, even the iPod (Apple’s MP3 player, which you can read more about in Book III, Chapter 2) originally used only a FireWire connection. (The FireWire official name is IEEE 1394, but even the Cupertino crew doesn’t call it that — at least not very often.)

First things first. As countless racing fans will tell you, it’s all about the speed, my friend. The original FireWire 400 port delivered 400 Mbps (megabits per second), which proved fast enough for most peripherals of the day to communicate with a Macintosh. The following list includes a number of hardware toys that are well known for transferring prodigious file sizes:

Digital video (DV) camcorders

High-resolution digital cameras

Scanners and some printers

External hard drives and CD/DVD recorders

Networking between computers

For example, consider the sheer size of a typical digital video clip captured by one of today’s DV camcorders. DV buffs commonly transfer several hundred megabytes of footage to their computers at one time. Check out the relative speeds of the different types of ports in Table 3-1, and you’ll see a big attraction of FireWire 800, USB 3.0, and Thunderbolt connections.

Table 3-1 Transfer Speeds for Ports through the Ages

Port	Appeared on Personal Computer When	Transfer Speed (in Megabits)
PC Serial	1981	Less than 1 Mbps
PC Parallel	1981	1 Mbps
USB (version 1.1)	1996	12 Mbps
FireWire 400	1996	400 Mbps (version 1)
USB (version 2.0)	2001	480 Mbps
FireWire 800	2002	800 Mbps
USB (version 3.0)	2010	5 Gbps (5,000 Mbps)
Thunderbolt	2011	10 Gbps (10,000 Mbps)

Ouch! Not too hard to figure that one out. Here are three other important benefits to FireWire:

Control over connection: This is a ten-cent term that engineers use, meaning that you can control whatever gadget you’ve connected using FireWire from your computer. This is pretty neat when you think about it; for example, you can control your mini-DV camcorder from the comfort of your computer keyboard, just as though you were pressing the buttons on the camcorder.

Hot-swapped: You don’t have to reboot your Mac or restart OS X every time that you plug (or unplug) a FireWire device. Instead, the FireWire peripheral is automatically recognized (as long as the operating system has the correct driver) and ready to transfer.

Power through the port: FireWire can provide power to a device through the same wire — typically, enough power is available for an external drive or recorder — so you don’t need an external AC power cord for some FireWire devices. (Apologies to owners of DV camcorders, but those things eat power like a pig eats slop.)

You’ll note from Table 3-1 that FireWire 800 (okay, really named IEEE 1394 B, but no one calls it that) delivers a respectable 800 Mbps. Although nowhere near as fast as a USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt connection, FireWire 800 peripherals are much easier to find at the time of this writing than Thunderbolt devices. If your Mac sports USB 3.0 connectors, a USB 3.0 external device makes a nice compromise: much faster than FireWire 800, but much less expensive than Thunderbolt peripherals (and much easier to find, at least for now).

Oh, and as you would expect from Apple, FireWire 800 ports are backward-compatible with older FireWire 400 hardware. However, the ports aren’t exactly the same, so you’ll need a plastic port converter to connect FireWire 400 devices to a FireWire 800 port. (Such important little conversion fixtures are commonly called dongles. No, I’m not making that up. Ask your favorite techno-wizard.)

Travelling at Warp Speed with Thunderbolt

Thunderbolt, Apple’s latest external connection, is listed at 10 gigabits per second (Gbps), not megabits per second (Mbps); see Table 3-1. Here’s your techno-nerd trivia for the day: Data on a 1 Gbps connection is moving as fast as data on a 1,000 Mbps connection. That means that Thunderbolt is literally more than 12 times faster than FireWire 800! Heck, Thunderbolt trumps even USB 3.0 technology, which has a maximum speed of only 5 Gbps.

Thunderbolt’s sheer jump-to-warp speed performance allows something that’s never been possible before: Mac owners can edit uncompressed digital video in real time on an external Thunderbolt hard drive! (That’s a chore that requires moving huge amounts of data very fast between your computer’s processor and hard drive, which until now simply wasn’t possible on an external drive.) Thunderbolt is also versatile — it even supports a direct high-definition connection between your Mac and your HDMI flat-screen TV, or a superfast high-resolution monitor like the Apple LED Cinema Display.

A single Thunderbolt port can handle up to six peripherals, including a mixture of a high-resolution display and devices like hard drives and Blu-ray recorders. And, like FireWire, Thunderbolt can provide plenty of power to a connected device as well. Probably the only downside to Thunderbolt (at least at the time of this writing) is that Thunderbolt devices are not generally available yet, and are likely to be significantly more expensive than their USB or FireWire counterparts. Such is the sad lament of the early adopter of cutting-edge computer hardware!

Understanding USB and the Tale of Two Point Oh

The other resident port on today’s Apple computers is the ubiquitous USB 3.0 (found on the latest MacBooks) and its older brother USB 2.0. If you were consumed by curiosity, USB is short for Universal Serial Bus. (By the way, ubiquitous means ever-present or universal, which I quickly looked up by using my Dictionary widget — read all about widgets in Book II, Chapter 2.) USB has taken the world by storm. It’s used for everything from mice to keyboards, speakers, digital cameras, and even external drives and DVD recorders. (A friend of mine never misses the chance to point out that USB — which was originally developed by Intel, the makers of the Core i5 and i7 processors — was given its first widespread implementation on the original iMac. You’re welcome, Intel.)

USB 3.0 delivers a superfast 5 Gbps connection, and USB 2.0 delivers performance comparable to the original FireWire standard: USB 2.0 can transfer 480 Mbps, although far less efficiently than FireWire, so the FireWire connection is still faster overall. (Don’t call Apple snobbish; at the time of this writing, all Mac desktop models in the Apple stables have USB 2.0 ports, and the new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models feature USB 3.0 ports.)

Like FireWire, USB connections are hot-swappable and may provide power over the connection. (Some USB ports don’t supply all the power that devices need — more on this later in this chapter.) A USB port offers a more limited version of Control over Connection as well, making it a good choice for virtually all digital cameras.

Speaking of digital cameras. . . . Smaller devices that use a USB connection to your Mac may not have standard USB ports. For example, digital cameras and cellphones are notorious for featuring mini-USB connectors, which are much smaller than a standard USB port. If you’re wondering why your device needs a special cable (supplied by the manufacturer), here’s why: One end looks like a standard USB connector and plugs into your Mac, and the other is deliberately tiny and shaped differently, and plugs into the device.

Owners of current Mac Pro desktop models can add a USB 3.0 adapter card to use the faster peripherals.

Hey, You Need a Hub!

Suppose that you’ve embraced FireWire and USB and you now have two USB drives hanging off the rear end of your Mac — and suddenly you buy an iPod. (Or you get another USB device that’s as much fun as an iPod, if that’s actually possible.) Now you’re faced with too many devices for too few ports. You could eject a drive and unhook it each time that you want to connect your iPod, but there must be a more elegant way to connect. Help!

Enter the hub. Both the FireWire and USB specifications allow you to connect a device called a hub, which is really nothing more than a glorified splitter adapter that provides you with additional ports. With a FireWire or USB hub at work, you do lose a port on your Mac; however, most hubs multiply that dedicated port into four or eight ports. Again, all this is transparent, and you don’t need to hide anything up your sleeve. Adding a hub is just as plug-and-play easy as adding a regular FireWire/USB device.

When shopping for a USB hub, make sure you choose a model that provides full power to each port. As I discuss later in the chapter, many USB peripherals draw their AC power from the port itself — these devices won’t work with a cheaper hub that doesn’t supply that juice. Oh, and one more shopping tip: If your Mac sports USB 3.0 ports, you’ll naturally need a hub that can handle USB 3.0 connections.

I should also mention that FireWire supports daisy-chaining — a word that stretches all the way back to the days of the Atari and Commodore computers, when devices had extra ports in the back so that additional stuff could be plugged in. However, not every FireWire drive has a daisy-chain port (also called a passthru port). With daisy-chaining, you can theoretically add 63 FireWire devices (or 127 USB devices) to your Mac — talk about impressing them at your next Mac user group meeting!

Uh, My External Device Is Just Sitting There: Troubleshooting

Man, I hate it when FireWire and USB devices act like boat anchors. FireWire and USB peripherals are so doggone simple that when something goes wrong, it really aggravates you. Fortunately, I’ve been down those roads many a time before, so in this section, I unleash my experience. (That sounds a little frightening, but it’s a good thing. Really.)

Common FireWire and USB headaches

Because FireWire and USB are so alike in so many ways, I can handle possible troubleshooting solutions for both types of hardware at one time:

Problem: Every time I turn off or unplug my external peripheral, OS X gets irritated and displays a nasty message saying that I haven’t properly disconnected the device.

Solution: This happens because you haven’t ejected the peripheral. I know that sounds a little strange for a device like an external hard drive or a digital camera, but it’s essentially the same reasoning as ejecting a CD or DVD from your Desktop. When you click your USB or FireWire device and hold down the mouse button, the Trash icon turns into an Eject icon. Just drag the device icon to the Eject icon and drop it, and the external device disappears from your Desktop. (You can also click the device icon to select it and press +E. And don’t forget the right-click menu — right-click the device and choose Eject.) At that point, you’re then safe to turn off the device or unplug the FireWire/USB cable.

If Mountain Lion recognizes the device as an external drive, which is usually the case with a digital camera, external hard drive, or external DVD/Blu-ray recorder, you can simply click the Eject button next to the device icon in the Finder window’s sidebar.

Problem: The device doesn’t show a power light.

Solution: Check to make sure that the power cable is connected — unless, of course, you have a device that’s powered through the connection itself. This can sometimes pose its own share of problems, however, when using USB devices. Not all USB ports provide power to devices because some are designed only for connecting mice, keyboards, and joysticks.

To check whether an unpowered USB port is your problem, either connect the device directly to a USB port on your Mac or connect it to a powered hub or another computer. If the device works when it’s connected to another port, you found the culprit.

Problem: The device shows a power light but just doesn’t work.

Solution: This can occur because of problems with your cable or your hub. To check, borrow a friend’s cables and test to see whether the device works. If you’re testing the hub, try connecting the device directly to your Mac using the same cable to see whether it works without the hub.

If you’re attempting to connect a FireWire device through another FireWire device, try connecting that first device directly to see whether it works. If so, the middleman device either needs to be switched on to pass the data through or it doesn’t support daisy-chaining at all — in which case, you may be able to place the “problem” device at the end of the chain. Of course, you can always connect both devices to a powered FireWire hub.

Problem: OS X reports that I have a missing driver.

Solution: Check the manufacturer’s website and download a new copy of the USB or FireWire drivers for your device because they’ve been corrupted, overwritten, or erased entirely. Because OS X loads the driver for a USB or FireWire device when it’s connected, sometimes just unplugging and reconnecting a peripheral will do the trick.

Check those drivers

Speaking of drivers . . . old and worn-out drivers are a sore spot with me. Drivers are simply programs that tell OS X how to communicate with your external device. Each new version of OS X contains updated drivers, but make certain that you check for new updates on a regular basis. That means using both the Software Update feature in OS X (which I cover briefly in Book II, Chapter 3 and much more in Book I, Chapter 7) and going to the websites provided by your USB and FireWire hardware manufacturers.