FireWire Spec to Boost Data Speeds to 3.2 Gbps 223
Stony Stevenson writes "A new set of data transfer specs may reach new Firewire speed records. The new transfer version is called S3200 and builds on the earlier specification approved by the IEEE.' The technology will be able to use existing FireWire 800 cables and connectors while delivering a major boost in performance. The new spec also will let users interconnect various home-networking appliances via coax cable, linking HDTVs with set-top boxes, TVs, and computers in various rooms around a home or office. The new release enables the transmission of FireWire data over distances of more than 100 meters. Home entertainment centers are likely to be an early application.'"
I think Apple.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway, when apple calls it firewire2, then it'll get adopted.
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I haven't found too much use for my FW800 port... I just hope that I can find a sweet external drive for the FW3200
Re:I think Apple.... (Score:5, Informative)
I've got a drive with USB 2.0, FW400, FW800, and eSATA connectors. (It's a LaCie "quadra," if anyone is interested.)
In terms of performance, that's pretty much the order, there -- USB is slow, despite it's claims of 480mbits/sec. FW800 and eSATA get me about 85MBytes/sec reading from the raw device; writing appears to be a bit slower, but that was going through the filesystem, so I'll do another test on a drive I don't mind wiping out :).
As with SCSI, the big advantage the faster FW speeds have is that you can have multiple devices chained. So you can have six or seven disks on the chain, and not worry about running out of bandwidth. eSATA doesn't give me that advantage.
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I see 3 of those 500GB models in that little rack replacing my current external FW-400 RAID in about 10 days...
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I have two older LaCie disks on a FW800 chain. They are the triple-interface version with FW400, USB2 and two FW800 ports. With FW800, I can plug both disks into a laptop at the same time with a single cable (there's another FW800 cable strung between the two) and get 30MB/s copying from one disk to the other (like I said, these disks are a few years old now). The lack of FW800 on the old MacBook Pros was the reason I delayed upgrading my PowerBook for so long.
FireWire is also a good way of adding an
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That is why I put a Firewire card in my G4 MDD tower, so that I can have each of my three external drives hooked up to its own dedicated FW400 port. (but of course the big drives are on the inside, since the MDD has four drive bays and two optical drive bays)
Of course that's a little more difficult to do with a laptop, but you're not likely to be leaving drives permanently attached like you would with a desktop.
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Not only that but also USB networking requires special software. Linux/WinXP/2K/98 all do FW networking out of the box. Vista does NOT, however, so keep that in mind if you need it.
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You're thinking of IEEE1394, which it still is. And Sony's iLink implementation was the unpowered 4-pin version of it.
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Betamax has also been the basis for ED Beta, the prosumer format nearly every TV crew uses and has used over the last two decades. Trying to create a black and while picture by dialing up t
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Originally, probably. The trademark is now freely licensed, though.
http://www.1394ta.org/license/FireWire_License-Guides_v6.pdf
Better yet.... 3.0 (Score:3, Interesting)
Geeks get the 400 vs 800 reference, but I think nongeeks get it completely. Sure 400 is not as good as 800, but what does that mean compared to USB?
USB is 1.0 and 2.0. Firewire should be 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. Why? Because the general masses see version digits as newer = better. USB is only on 2.0? But Firewire is on 3.0? Gee, that must mean Firewire is more advanced!
Geeks know better, but you don't tell only to the
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stupid tags (Score:5, Funny)
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I would just like a single standard... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:I would just like a single standard... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I would just like a single standard... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen the same thing on my MacBook Pro with my external drive. FireWire 400 is maybe 25% faster, FireWire 800 is 50% faster (same drive). The big thing is CPU utilization though. Maxing out the disk on FireWire 800 is no problem. Very little CPU usage (maybe under 10%, this is based on a little graph, I've never looked at hard numbers). Running it over USB has a very noticeable CPU impact.
FireWire is great at what it was made for. USB is very good at what it was designed for (mice, keyboards) and weak at things it was forced to do (hard drives).
It's all Intel's fault. They put USB on everything, but didn't put FireWire on anything until very recently, if they even have by now. So USB "won".
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If you really wanted to blame someone, you can at least partially blame Steve Jobs. Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] mentions that one of the reason Firewire wasn't as popular as USB was the high licensing and manufacturing costs compared to USB. (One of the IP owners is Apple). This gentleman [teener.com] mentions that just when Apple was going to give away licenses for a fairly cheap price (199
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I haven't played around with the USB reliability with my latest Linux update since I just use Firewire instead.
Plus, I have no problem ganging Firewire dri
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I echo your statements about FW vs. USB on Linux.
One thing to note: There aren't many external FW enclosures for SATA, and they're all on the expensive side.
Re:I would just like a single standard... (Score:5, Informative)
The highest copy speed I have ever reached on FW400 is 32MB/s - limited by the ATA33-FW400 bridge chip (Oxford 911) while the highest speed I have ever seen with any combination of my USB2/480 external HDD boxes and PCs is 24MB/s with 18MB/s being more typical. Under the best circumstances, USB barely matches the SLOWEST speeds I take for granted on FW400. If I string two of my FireWire drives together and move data between the two boxes, I still get the same 24-30MB/s I am used to but if I try to do the same with USB2 and a hub, USB2 crawls at 8-10MB/s. In this scenario, FireWire is as much as 3X as fast as USB2.
With eSATA for external storage, USB3 (late 2008) for all sorts of high-bandwidth (4.8Gbps) devices and GbE for mainstream networking, FW3200 will become irrelevant soon enough: USB3 is supposed to be 4.8Gbps double-simplex fiber, blowing away FW3200 on raw speed and finally getting rid of USB1/2's half-duplex overhead.
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I wouldn't assume that USB3 will do much at all. If it doesn't require a more intelligent bus controller to offload the work, it will be torture on the CPU at those speeds, and if it does, a lot of manufacturers will reject it because it costs too much more to build cards for it, and a lot of users will reject it because of the substantial extra expense of the cards compared with other technologies. Similarly, for external devices, cost will probably play a more important role in driving adoption than any
Re:I would just like a single standard... (Score:5, Informative)
Whereas 1394 is device-centric - designed for tranferring video, audio, data, etc. between "dumb" devices.
The PC world "snubbed" 1394 (not completely) because of the $.25(or something equally absurd) royalty to Apple; Intel pushed USB.
1394 is more expensive to implement in hardware (which should be obvious - it's for dumb devices!), while USB is cheap - the CPU does most of the work.
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Re:I would just like a single standard... (Score:5, Informative)
Here are the technical specs for Firewire from Wiki:
FireWire can connect up to 63 peripherals in a tree topology (as opposed to Parallel SCSI's Electrical bus topology). It allows peer-to-peer device communication -- such as communication between a scanner and a printer -- to take place without using system memory or the CPU. FireWire also supports multiple hosts per bus. It is designed to support Plug-and-play and hot swapping. Its six-wire cable is more flexible than most Parallel SCSI cables and can supply up to 45 watts of power per port at up to 30 volts, allowing moderate-consumption devices to operate without a separate power supply. (As noted earlier, the Sony-branded i.LINK usually omits the power wiring of the cables and uses a 4-pin connector. Devices have to get their power by other means.)
FireWire devices implement the ISO/IEC 13213 "configuration ROM" model for device configuration and identification, to provide plug-and-play capability. All FireWire devices are identified by an IEEE EUI-64 unique identifier (an extension of the 48-bit Ethernet MAC address format) in addition to well-known codes indicating the type of device and the protocols it supports.
From the USB wiki:
USB was originally seen as a complement to FireWire (IEEE 1394), which was designed as a high-speed serial bus which could efficiently interconnect peripherals such as hard disks, audio interfaces, and video equipment. USB originally operated at a far lower data rate and used much simpler hardware, and was suitable for small peripherals such as keyboards and mice.
The most significant technical differences between FireWire and USB include the following:
* USB networks use a tiered-star topology, while FireWire networks use a repeater-based topology.
* USB uses a "speak-when-spoken-to" protocol; peripherals cannot communicate with the host unless the host specifically requests communication. A FireWire device can communicate with any other node at any time, subject to network conditions.
* A USB network relies on a single host at the top of the tree to control the network. In a FireWire network, any capable node can control the network.
These and other differences reflect the differing design goals of the two buses: USB was designed for simplicity and low cost, while FireWire was designed for high performance, particularly in time-sensitive applications such as audio and video. Although similar in theoretical maximum transfer rate, in real-world use, especially for high-bandwidth use such as external hard-drives, FireWire 400 generally has a significantly higher throughput than USB 2.0 Hi-Speed.[13][14][15][16] The newer FireWire 800 standard is twice as fast as FireWire 400 and outperforms USB 2.0 Hi-Speed both theoretically and practically.[17]
There are technical reasons why USB 2.0 devices cannot efficiently utilize all the available bandwidth. USB communication is based on polling the devices; there is no pipelining of commands. After sending a command to a device, the USB host must wait for a reply to the command before a new command can be sent to the same device. The bandwidth of a USB bus is divided by all devices connected to the bus. The USB host cannot send commands to one device while waiting for reply from another device. Since all communication is initiated by a USB host, the host must periodically poll all those USB devices that can provide data at unexpected intervals, such as network cards and keyboards. This consumes unnecessary resources when the devices are idle. These issues are being addressed by the forthcoming USB 3.0 specification, although it is not clear whether USB 3.0 is going to match FireWire in bandwidth efficiency.
Re:I would just like a single standard... (Score:5, Informative)
One of the big advantages FW has over USB is that a device can request, and get, a specific bandwidth. So, for example, a video camera can say, "I need to have 19mbits/sec." And if it can, then it'll get that -- and nothing on the bus will be able to take it away until it releases it.
When doing real-time applications such as video, this is pretty important.
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Compare and contrast with Firewire?
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Each device on a USB bus have to get equal bandwidth slices.
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Different devices can get different amounts of bandwidth on a Firewire tree.
Each device on a USB bus have to get equal bandwidth slices.
That's not precisely true...
The bandwidth a USB device gets depends on two things: The speed of the device itself (naturally) and how frequently it's polled by the host computer. So one device can be polled more frequently than others (and HID devices can suggest how frequently they should be polled) - so the devices don't get "equal bandwidth slices" (at least, not equal slices of the total bandwidth when you average over time), one device can take more than 1/N of the total bandwidth of the bus if it ne
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Async is used for devices like disks where you want to read a block but it doesn't really matter if the block doesn't come back right away.
Isochronous provides a fixed amount of bus bandwidth at fixed times, which is important if you are streaming audio or video.
Iso is guaranteed up to 80% of the bandwidth. Asynch is guaranteed at least 20%.
As for this "new standard" the story is talking about, no, it isn't new. 13
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Re:I would just like a single standard... (Score:5, Interesting)
Firewire is fast and cost more.
So they both existed. One was good for mice and keyboards, one was good for digital video and external hard drives.
Then USB2 came out which is almost as fast as firewire, and the lines got blurry.
Firewire was still considerably better as a technology. It does a lot of its own processing while usb2 offloads a lot of processing to the host system... so firewire drives don't tie up the CPU the way a USB2 one does. Firewire supports more simultaneous devices, and seems to have fewer issues with power as well. It also doesn't have stupid rectangular connectors that users will try upside down 50% of the time.
Then Firewire 3200 was announced and santify was restored.
USB2 is slow and cheap.
"Firewire-3200" is fast and costs more.
Do we 'need' usb? no. We could get by on just firewire. But usb is cheaper and a penny saved is a penny earned.
cheapness (Score:2)
I hope that Firewire-3200 quickly becomes price competitive, and that chipset vendors get smart and just bundle a 3200 controller in with their prosumer chipsets.
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When I said a penny saved is a penny earned I was serious.
Firewire maybe less than a dollar more expensive per port than USB, but it adds up. And the bean counters designing hardware care about the pennies.
Not too mention we couldn't cut over to pure firewire even if wanted to. Firewire versions of low bandwidth devices like keyboards, mi
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USB is slow and cheap. Firewire is fast and cost more.
For an OEM to add a firewire port costs about $1.50 more than a USB port. Not exactly a huge difference.
Do we 'need' usb? no. We could get by on just firewire. But usb is cheaper and a penny saved is a penny earned.
There is nothing wrong with USB for what it was designed for. The problem is when it is applied to a task it just isn't very good at, like hard drives. Even if you have USB-2 for a hard drive, it is still pretty inferior. It uses up your CPU, you need software to manage it, it is slower, and you can't just plug it into your video camera and go, because it needs a computer in between. Intel's insisten
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Yeah, but when you spread that across a million machines, you're talking real money.
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To the OEM it is. They are cheap bastards. And of course, customers are cheap bastards, who tend to care more about price than quality. Keep adding "only $1.50 more" to other companents, and soon you don't have that $300 PC. Not that anybody should be buying a shitty $300 PC, but people like cheap junk, as I said.
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I said "a penny saved is a penny earned" for a reason.
Plus the average PC comes with what? 6, 8, 10 ports? Times every motherboard you sell... sure to you its a buck fifty on a $500 PC... but to the OEM its a whole LOT of $1 parts. And if they can shave even a few off it makes a big difference to the bottom line.
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USB2 is slow and cheap.
"Firewire-3200" is fast and costs more.
Except that USB 3.0 has already been announced as well:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070918-intel-announces-demonstrates-usb-3-0.html [arstechnica.com]
The USB 3.0 target speed is 5 GBps, which would still make it one and a half times faster than the new Firewire 3200 standard... While retaining USB 2.0 backwards compatibility, which is a pretty big deal as well.
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Second, USB uses CPU. Firewire uses its own chip. (Which is why Apple removed the chip from the iPods, it wasn't going to fit with that and the video decoder in the same form factor).
USB is good because... there's no reason my mouse needs that much speed.
They're for completely d
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Now imagine a TV station or the latest Movie producer. Those seconds do matter. Imagine a 50 GB HD movie. Few extra seconds add up, and if it didn't we'd all be content running our 300 mHz Pentiums because "what's an extra second, right?"
Firewire 800 already supports multiple forms of transmission, including coax, optical, and Cat 5E. Here's an article from 2005 about FW800 and coax: http://www.engadgethd.com/2005/09/14/coax-making-a-comeback/ [engadgethd.com] It's just that most people don't know abo
Good for innovation...? (Score:2)
It seems to me that improvement in Firewire speed didnt really happen until USB 2 came along, and that now there is a speed-contest between USB and Firewire that cause the technologies to improve rapidly.
By contrast, the pace at which ethernet speeds evolved seems rather low...
Why still no optical link? (Score:2)
(I know, it's because that's not profitable enough for the manufacturers. They wouldn't be able to sell us new cables every 5 years)
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It seems that this boost is a way of running the optical speeds over copper, but I could be wrong -- the article isn't very technical.
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compared to sata 3Gbps (Score:3, Informative)
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Yeah -- so what? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've read a variety of posts about the problems with FireWire (see here [pcstats.com] and here [theappleblog.com] from what I found on Google), and the big problem is that FireWire didn't become a de facto standard seven or eight years ago when it was really needed. These days, it seems like few computers other than Macs ship with FireWire standard, and I've never seen a laptop in the wild outside of Macs with a six-pin FireWire 400 port, let alone 800.
I've heard this is chiefly due to Apple's initial intransigence regarding licensing; they demanded $1 per computer to use the "FireWire" name, making other device makers really angry [eetimes.com]. Considering how slim hardware margins are, no one was going to go for it. FireWire 400 is still technically superior to USB 2.0 in many ways, even today, but it's never reached the market penetration it needs, and now USB 2.0 is "good enough" for most purposes.
I use a Mac and so do many family members, and I've long counseled them to get only FireWire drives for backups. When Leopard came out, some were shopping for drives, and I found that I could not find FW400/USB 2 drives for as little as plain USB 2.0 drives. In other words, the FireWire premium for HDs appears to be at least $30. Not a good sign for market penetration.
Now FW 3200 is being discussed when FW 800 already seems dead on arrival in consumer land, and only supported to the limited extent it is by Apple. Not making it backwards compatible with FW400 was an idiotic decision that ensured whatever chance it had in the market was gone. In the meantime, eSATA and the like have come along and perhaps obviated the need for many FireWire applications altogether.
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FW800 is backwards compatible with FW400. The connector, however, is not.
This is a good thing, because the FW800 connector will be the same one used for FW3200 (or whatever it ends up being called :)).
You can, however, get an adapter pretty easily and cheaply. This will allow your FW800 device to plug into your FW400 chain (and run at 400Mbits/sec)... or your FW400 device to plug into your FW800 chain (and, while it will run at 400Mbits/sec, your FW800 devices will still be able to run at 800Mbits/sec!)
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Connectors are all fine well, but the time and energy necessary to buy, hang on to, and connect them makes such connectors a niche market. The operative word is convenience, and the more technical version of it is Metcalfe's law [wikipedia.org]. Everyone has USB, therefore everyone makes USB devices, and therefore more people get USB. Apple killed (or at least harmed) the virtuous cycle that might've made FW a standard in 1998 - 2000. Now only a very small number of machines (r
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You should probably shop around for drive enclosures. $30 premium for Firewire? You can buy encrypting Firewire/USB2.0 enclosures for less than $50.
No,
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These days, it seems like few computers other than Macs ship with FireWire standard, and I've never seen a laptop in the wild outside of Macs with a six-pin FireWire 400 port, let alone 800.
Toshiba laptops come with Firewire ports as well. It is, however, a rarity... which is sad. The main reason OS X is my base OS running my VMs, instead of in a VM under Linux is Apple's "boot in firewire" mode along with the "upgrade from previous computer" option for installs. When I get new hardware I enjoy the one-click feature to have all my old stuff on my new machine and it all configured for me. The easiest way to do this with Linux and Windows is to run them in VMs and let OS X handle it. Unless Fi
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I've seen the mini firewire port on many notebooks. I think the problem with puting the six pin port in it is that it would allow the device to consume power and that's not necessarily desirable when everything has to be so small and allowing more power to power a high-draw FW device can be a problem.
I think eSATA is the replacement for Firewire in many of its previous niches other than video decks and camcorders. It
Does it matter? (Score:5, Interesting)
Vista's firewire implementation is the pits. I think TI spec controllers basically didn't work at all even though the cards were recognized (maybe it was the other spec). MS recently released a hotfix that remedied some of the problems, but the controllers were then only working up to 100mbps and not 400 even with registry settings set to 400. Getting 12MB/s to an external hard disk instead of 48MB is pretty ghetto.
Also, MS recently released a technote saying that IP over Firewire wasn't an oversight in Vista. It is a feature that will never be re-implemented.
The 800lb gorilla has left the building and I don't think Linux and OSX computers will be enough to keep the market for firewire devices robust except.
Firewire chaining and networking (Score:3, Interesting)
Co-ax (Score:4, Funny)
Its like a VCR... (Score:4, Interesting)
USB 2.0 = Super VHS
FireWire = Beta - technically superior but doomed due to lack of marketplace penetration.
Seems to me that the iPod was the first real killer Firewire app for the masses (yeah, video and audio pro's had their own killer apps for Firewire, but they didn't represent enough of the marketplace for that to matter. If Apple had kept the iPod's Firewire only devices (as were the first generations) something would have had to give. Either the iPod would have been DOA (in the PC world at least, since every new Mac has had at least one Firewire port for years), or PC manufacturers would have been forced to start making Firewire the standard due to demand.
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DVD = usb 2.0 good
firewire = blue ray / HD-DVD better but costs more and is not as common.
AKA most pcs come DVD very few have blue ray or HD-DVD.
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That analogy sucks even more than the sucky VHS/Beta analogy. Wait a minute, why are people trying to make analogies in this case, when there is no analogy needed?
Oh right, this is slashdot. I forgot that you need to reach your daily analogy quota. BMW vs. Chevy FTW!
Firewire2USB? (Score:2)
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The Firewire gear is just a CD carousel, so any extra Firewire features aren't needed. Couldn't a Firewire/USB adapter just allow those Firewire devices that use only the USB features to run?
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HDTVs and set-top boxes people (Score:2, Interesting)
The new FireWire release will likely be compared to USB 3.0, which is still under development.
Read the article again!
The new spec also will let users interconnect various home-networking appliances via coax cable, linking HDTVs with set-top boxes...
Why would I pay $100 for an HDMI cable to connect a Blu-ray/HD-DVD to my HDTV when I could use a $4 coax cable instead! PLUS, you can send the signal over 100 meters... with any hope, there will be splitters so that I can send a movie/broadcast from my cable providers set-top box to EVERY tv in my entire house.
Step away from your PC a moment and consider the possibilities this brings to the Home Entertainme
FireWie over RJ-45 / Cat5e (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm curious to know if the new 3.2 Gbps document allows for Cat5e, or whether you can only use it over the FW800 cables.
Oh no, please, no... (Score:2)
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Why not HDMI? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Firewire can send the compressed data to the massive upscaller/decoder that can send the data to the TV. The TV can also send back remote codes to the decoder and storage medium. There does not have to be a one to one ratio on firewire you could have two TV's watching the same thing or something different think one set top box with DVR the can serve every TV in the house, adding a HTPC is trivial as connecting it to firewire. Pretty much it's designed to
USB has a nice connector at least (Score:2)
At least USB deserves that much credit, the connector is quite nice. it plugs in easily, doesn't break unless you do something really stupid, and it is easily removed. Only thing I'll complain about is the tiny version you find in cameras and cellphones. I'm just wondering
Firewire is a dead end technology (Score:2)
The secon
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With that said, CPU utilization will indeed be a HUGE concern since USB 3.0 is so fast. The relatively minor CPU overhead of USB 2.0 will give way to CPU stalling overhead unless USB 3.0 addresses it. There's not enough information to make a statement ab
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I have two shells for some laptop drives. The older Firewire shell, with an ATA drive, is very reliable, feels as fast as the internal drive, and requires only one cord to run. My newer one is a USB sata shell -- two wires, the drive seems to get bogged down during large transfers, and it can be finicky about mounting. Sadly, when I went looking for a shell to put that sata drive in, I
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http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/ [macsales.com]
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USB is NOT good for webcams unless they're close. (Score:3, Interesting)
I beg to differ.
I wired my new (2001) house with a couple runs of cat-5E from the comp room to each corner, expecting inexpensive single-chip cameras to become available to be used for security cams.
Well they became available, all right. But all the cheap ones were USB, not Ethernet, and USB has a distance limit suitable for a workstation's desk rather than a house.
If it was just an electrical issue I could have built suitable level-s
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Frankly Firewire should be used for video cameras and USB should be used for flash card readers. eSATA should be used for external SATA drives (the clue is in the name!)
Ahh, but can you plug an eSATA drive into your (dumb) video recorder and transfer data straight to it? That's one of the big reasons Firewire is still here, because it works for both computers and other device types without CPUs like drives, cameras, stereo receivers, etc. I mean if I already have a Firewire port on my laptop for my video camera, why do I want a eSATA port as well?
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3Gbps, cabling up to 2 metres......
Gosh, a whole 2 meters? Did you ever stop to think that many people need a lot more than that? P{articularly in things like entertainment and video production. You said it yourself, eSATA is really only good for one thing. Firewire is far more versatile. So, if anything should die, it should be eSATA for the sake of Firewire. eSATA is just yet another not-widely-supported protocol that is helping take oxygen away from superior standards. The end result of this is that shit like USB ends up winning, becaus
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