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News New Firewire tech to offer 3.2Gb/sec

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by CardJoe, 17 Dec 2007.

  1. CardJoe

    CardJoe Freelance Journalist

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  2. Zurechial

    Zurechial Elitist

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    Just plain awesome.

    Especially with competition between Firewire and USB, the consumer wins again!

    I wish they'd make Firewire S3200 100% hot-pluggable though..
    A few of the Firewire-based devices I have came with warning cards directing me to never connect or disconnect firewire devices while either of the devices is powered on, due to risk of sparking and destruction of connected devices.
    This makes it a pain in the ass to switch my M-Audio Firewire 410 Recording sound card from my Desktop system to my Laptop and vice versa.

    I'm sure plenty of people hot-plug their FW devices regularly, but all the warning cards make me too scared to do it when my expensive hardware is involved..
     
  3. Bauul

    Bauul Sir Bongaminge

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    Pah, who needs upgrades? I transfer all my data manually using 3.5" Floppies and that works perfectly well!
     
  4. steveo_mcg

    steveo_mcg What's a Dremel?

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    Is this not faster than the hard disk could cope with?
     
  5. Bionic-Blob

    Bionic-Blob What's a Dremel?

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    whats wrong with eSATA?
     
  6. amk21

    amk21 What's a Dremel?

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    Who said that there is anything wrong with eSATA?
    Looking forward to multi-gigabit speeds to your external storage, or will you be sticking with USB? Perhaps you're already enjoying blazing speeds via eSATA?
     
  7. specofdust

    specofdust Banned

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    3200Mbits per second, so 400MB/s, so realisticly (going on past firewire performance) about 350MB/s tops. Beyond what a single hard disk will do today, but you already get external RAID 0 arrays that are floating about as external hard disks - those can probably manage in the region of 150-180MB/s, and with SSD's taking off and in theory being able to be a fair bit fast this should give plenty of room for the future. And afterall, who can complain that their interface is faster than it needs to be?

    Personally, I'm sick and tired of USB with it's high CPU usage, its rubbish sustained speeds, it's inability to claim a specific volume of bandwidth for a device (for guarenteeing realtime playback) and it's general crappyness in comparison to firewire. So I hope that this new firewire standard gets much more integrated and used by everyone, not less so.

    Firewire has been deserving to take the crown as the bus standard for years, and although I honestly don't expect it, I really do hope that this can help it at least be put on equal footing with USB, and maybe even supplant it as the univeral bus.
     
  8. DXR_13KE

    DXR_13KE BananaModder

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    i would very much like to see this being used for communication between 2 pcs....
     
  9. specofdust

    specofdust Banned

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    Chances are it can be, all other firewire specs so far have had the capacity to be used as ad-hoc LAN cables. Should provide significant speed increases over gigabit too, although most people won't notice them, and the limiting factor that it's point to point would probably put off most people.
     
  10. mrplow

    mrplow obey the fist!!

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    I don't think firewire will ever win... USB is far too well seated now to be toppled from it's perch, unless USB3 completely fails to appear which is pretty unlikely.

    Firewire always seemed the cleverer approach, but how often do those fail to win over some well marketed sub-standard alternative?
     
  11. jkeyser14

    jkeyser14 What's a Dremel?

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    That's nice and all, but pretty much worthless with today's current hard drives... Maybe in a few years when people start RAIDing SSD's.
     
  12. MrWillyWonka

    MrWillyWonka Chocolate computers galore!

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    LAN networking is feasible with this technology with reported distances of over 100m (unlike the original IEEE 1394 specificiation with just 4.5m), whether the backbone will support it is another question. Providing internal hdds can get to the firewire port fast enough we could see nice transfer time between pc's, not just between an external drive and pc.

    As said, USB is far too standardised for firewire to become mainstream quickly but who knows.
     
  13. OleJ

    OleJ Me!

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    Whoa there man of the future! Some of us still enjoy our punch card archives of contemporary music. And young'uns nowadays claim that they can store large amounts of data. Hah! I'll show you large amounts of data. Lemme just find you a song for my dance organ and you shall see!
     
  14. specofdust

    specofdust Banned

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    Sad, and true :(
     
  15. HourBeforeDawn

    HourBeforeDawn a.k.a KazeModz

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    well isnt USB 3.0 suppose to be just as fast, I think it was at least 3gbps?
     
  16. DeX

    DeX Mube Codder

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    So what exactly has changed since the days when they were speccing out USB 1? I don't get why they didn't just make USB or Firewire 1 3Gb/s to begin with?
     
  17. Mister_Tad

    Mister_Tad Will work for nuts Super Moderator

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    Are you serious?
    The same reason we didn't have gigabit networking in the 80s
     
  18. leexgx

    leexgx CPC hang out zone (i Fix pcs i do )

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    firewire never taken off due to you had to pay for it (the company's did any way) USB been around from windows 95 (my amd k5 120mhz, motherboard had an USB header just did not have the cable for it)

    USB performace sucks and uses lots of CPU (cheap software USB chips, very rare to see hardware USB) only works with winME (crashme) or newer (natively)
    Firewire i think has worked from windows 95 probly not tho, it worked on windows98 with out extra drivers for most devices
    firewire is an hardware device never been software connection
     
  19. HourBeforeDawn

    HourBeforeDawn a.k.a KazeModz

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    be nice lol he may not have been even born yet in that time lol
     
  20. Cabe

    Cabe What's a Dremel?

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    I still want wireless firewire....mmmm camery...
     
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