Bandwidth for USB bus and Firewire bus?

badtz wrote:
🙂

(1) Does the 5 USB ports on the new NVIDIA Ion-based Mac Mini share the same USB bus bandwidth? If so, what's the total bandwidth available?

yes, there are 5 ports, but don't know how many separate busses they have. you can inda tell in system prefs to see if they are all chained together or they have separate line items.

(2) Does the Firewire port share into the same USB bandwidth? If not, what's its bandwidth?

firewire is totally different, has it's own controller chip, & doesn't require assistance from the CPU as USB does. Max transfer on the newest model is 800 mbits/sec, this why it's called Firewire 800.

badtz wrote:
I assume firewire/usb goes through the same southbridge bus, was curious how the nvidia ion platform was laid out.

there isn't a nothbridge / southbridge setup anymore with the minis using the 9400M, it's all one chip.

I also assume all 5 USB ports share the same bus, thus, two USB drives attached onto the the Mac Mini would share the same bandwidth and not get allocated all 480Mbps per port. True?

not sure, you can tell by looking at system profiler > USB. each triangle is usually considered a separate controller. anything listed under than is chained to that controller - hubs, devices, ports.

The five USB ports apparently share three high speed 480mbs buses. See http://blog.fosketts.net/2009/03/10/mac-mini-diamond-rough/

Message was edited by: Saul in PA

great! hope this helps the op out.

You asked a great question that I wanted to know also. That reviewer put together a pretty good article. Also give credit to Google for finding it.

Glad you got your answer!