The IEEE 1394 High Speed Serial Bus is a versatile, high-performance, and low-cost method of promoting interoperability between all types of A/V and computing devices. IEEE 1394 provides two transfer modes: asynchronous mode for best effort service and isochronous mode for best effort service with bandwidth reservation. This paper shows the bus performance and compared the transfer odes first at the link level and then at the application level. For the application level performance, we analyze the bus systems with fixed and adaptive interfaces, applied between the upper layer and the 1394 layer, using polling systems. Also we verifies the analysis models with simulation studies. Based on our analysis, we conclude that the adaptive interface reduces the bus access time and so increases the bus utilization.