[X4U] USB 2.0 vs Firewire?

[B. Kuestner]

<http://www.barefeats.com/usb2.html>

Note also the following on the above page:

> The Windows PC implementation of USB 2.0 puts the Mac to shame.  
> 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. We measured 33MB/s READ and 27MB/s WRITE.

USB 2.0 has been slow on the Mac for years. Many thought that we  
would see improvements with the move to Intel and thus to new  
chipsets. But still, USB 2.0 on OS X is slow. I have not yet seen an  
explanation for this. If the cause were in the OS I would expect that  
somebody offered a hack by looking at Darwin and fixing the problem.  
Similar to what folks did when broadband access was slower in OS X  
than it had to be. But I am not aware of any explanation or fix to  
this phenomenon.

Björn