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I just pulled this up, as I happend to be looking at some fireware gaming threads on another forum a while back.
Firewire is a tad slower than USB2; it's only 400mbps compared to USB2's 480mbps. Firewire does basically the same as USB, it allows you to swap devices "hotswapping" without turning off your computer and turning it back on.
There is one major diffence that benefits Firewire users is that it is isosynchronus. That means that if you have for example 3 devices, that all 3 would get 480mbps bandwidth to use, while USB2 is shared between devices. This is the ugly side of using USB2.
You can't boot from usb2 drives.
Both USB2 and Firewire use DMA driven engines for data transfer from the
host to the bus and back again. USB has a higher load on the system,
however, as continuous interrupt driven polling takes place to monitor
the bus for activity.
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