Firewire ...

In light of the uproar being caused by the removal of the Firewire port from the new Macbooks, I was wondering if anyone (and I'm talking about Windows users) has ever used the Firewire port on their machine?

I just looked around the back of my laptop ... and quel supris! It does actually have one!

Never used it myself, and I'm not going to start now!

for video transfers it is way faster than usb

do you have avideo camera?

jamie said:

for video transfers it is way faster than usb

do you have avideo camera?

Fair enough, but do you, as a Windows bod, actually use the port?

Mmm ... I see that my portable hard drive has a Firewire port too.

No, I don't have a video camera.

Yep, I use it for making external backups.

I have a 1394 port on my ThinkPad (FireWire is an Apple trademark, it seems) but I've never actually used it. Digital video cameras may support it, but all my external harddrives don't and I really had no use of it so far. I could have gotten a MyBook Professional instead of a MyBook Essential, which had an eSATA and FireWire port in addition to USB2, but I really saw no reason to pay almost 20% extra for a bit of extra speed.

Yggdrasil said:

I have a 1394 port on my ThinkPad (FireWire is an Apple trademark, it seems) but I've never actually used it. Digital video cameras may support it, but all my external harddrives don't and I really had no use of it so far. I could have gotten a MyBook Professional instead of a MyBook Essential, which had an eSATA and FireWire port in addition to USB2, but I really saw no reason to pay almost 20% extra for a bit of extra speed.

With current HDDs and sata you can get ~4-5 times the speed of USB2, there's nothing special about eSATA, I use internal sata drives externally without esata all the time. Because the drives are already SATA internally, there is no extra to pay. If your computers don't have a sata port externally, then of course that must be added, I have 4 external sata ports on my desktop and 2 in laptop.

I don't like USB because it is not a scalable interface. There should be an ubiquitous interface that allows compatibility with scaling in terms of implementation cost and performance. Practically speaking it'd something close to fiber network cables + power going along side the fibre and the power cable also used as slower data channel. Single laser could be used to implement multiple ports using time-division multiplexing.

You could argue that USB is scaling up but my argument is that it isn't because we have these external drive boxes with what 3 different interfaces. If the people behind USB had done their jobs proper, they would've developed it at similar pace as IDE did with speed increments every ~two years on average. USB has been so slowly improved and perhaps also too cost driven that it's always behind the needs of the day. USB3 aims for 600 MB/s. Seems reasonable now but when are these devices as common as USB2? When that year comes around it might be that 600 MB/s is again considered slow and people are saying we should've gone with some type of extended HyperTransport type thing with some kind of mini connectors that can be used together to bundle bandwidth available to same peripheral using a different cable or multiple small cables.

androidi said:

Yggdrasil said:

*snip*

With current HDDs and sata you can get ~4-5 times the speed of USB2, there's nothing special about eSATA, I use internal sata drives externally without esata all the time. Because the drives are already SATA internally, there is no extra to pay. If your computers don't have a sata port externally, then of course that must be added, I have 4 external sata ports on my desktop and 2 in laptop.

I don't like USB because it is not a scalable interface. There should be an ubiquitous interface that allows compatibility with scaling in terms of implementation cost and performance. Practically speaking it'd something close to fiber network cables + power going along side the fibre and the power cable also used as slower data channel. Single laser could be used to implement multiple ports using time-division multiplexing.

You could argue that USB is scaling up but my argument is that it isn't because we have these external drive boxes with what 3 different interfaces. If the people behind USB had done their jobs proper, they would've developed it at similar pace as IDE did with speed increments every ~two years on average. USB has been so slowly improved and perhaps also too cost driven that it's always behind the needs of the day. USB3 aims for 600 MB/s. Seems reasonable now but when are these devices as common as USB2? When that year comes around it might be that 600 MB/s is again considered slow and people are saying we should've gone with some type of extended HyperTransport type thing with some kind of mini connectors that can be used together to bundle bandwidth available to same peripheral using a different cable or multiple small cables.

For me, as an end user, there really isn't any contest.
All my laptops have multiple USB ports.
All my desktops have multiple USB ports.
It's easy to find USB extension cords, multi-part hubs and peripherals.

I have a Firewire port on my laptop, but on no other machine. I use my external storage devices mostly for storing music, which means I just need it to be faster than the bitrate. No problem there. I don't do video editing or multiple-gigabyte copies on a daily basis. All the technological advantage of FireWire is a bit wasted on me, I'm afraid.
This is not to say I wouldn't feel the difference - copying does take time and minimizing that time would be a blessing, but it's something I can live with for the sake of ubiquity and convenience. If my portable HDD was FireWire I would have had higher speeds, but probably had problems when trying to use it on other people's computers. And paying for a dual interface seems just pointless.

androidi said:

Yggdrasil said:

*snip*

With current HDDs and sata you can get ~4-5 times the speed of USB2, there's nothing special about eSATA, I use internal sata drives externally without esata all the time. Because the drives are already SATA internally, there is no extra to pay. If your computers don't have a sata port externally, then of course that must be added, I have 4 external sata ports on my desktop and 2 in laptop.

I don't like USB because it is not a scalable interface. There should be an ubiquitous interface that allows compatibility with scaling in terms of implementation cost and performance. Practically speaking it'd something close to fiber network cables + power going along side the fibre and the power cable also used as slower data channel. Single laser could be used to implement multiple ports using time-division multiplexing.

You could argue that USB is scaling up but my argument is that it isn't because we have these external drive boxes with what 3 different interfaces. If the people behind USB had done their jobs proper, they would've developed it at similar pace as IDE did with speed increments every ~two years on average. USB has been so slowly improved and perhaps also too cost driven that it's always behind the needs of the day. USB3 aims for 600 MB/s. Seems reasonable now but when are these devices as common as USB2? When that year comes around it might be that 600 MB/s is again considered slow and people are saying we should've gone with some type of extended HyperTransport type thing with some kind of mini connectors that can be used together to bundle bandwidth available to same peripheral using a different cable or multiple small cables.

Well, you do realize, that USB aims towards intercompatibility and the ability to do hot plug and play without any worries. eSATA drives get cached and the (on HDD) cache is lost when you unplug it or power it off before shutting down the machine in standby or a similar mode. Depending on the driver it caused me some bluescreen nightmares, too, when Windows couldn't find the drive anymore. Anyone knows how to eject such drives?

IEE 1394 has 400 Mbps, USB2 has 480Mbps, and I personally only have such a port on an old notebook wich only had USB1.1 (16Mbps) so there, it was faster, but I never had any use for it, IEE 1394 devices are just the same way of annoying than the eSATA ones. Unplug when it's running and you WILL certainly use cached data. Don't have a cable anymore, I think I sold it to someone who needed one for his video camera after he bought some Pinnacle Systems capture card which didn't come with a cable back then.

Ion Todirel said:

It was removed only from MacBooks, Pros still have a 800 one...

I don't use it, on my laptop I have a 400 one which is still too slow for what I need, I use eSATA...

On the Mac side where Windows bios concerns re external booting are not a concern, the ability to backup to an external Firewire drive is a superior alternative to USB2 for any number of reasons, including these provided by Dave Nanian of shirt-pocket.com (developer of SuperDuper, a primo Mac backup app):

brich said:

Ion Todirel said:

*snip*

On the Mac side where Windows bios concerns re external booting are not a concern, the ability to backup to an external Firewire drive is a superior alternative to USB2 for any number of reasons, including these provided by Dave Nanian of shirt-pocket.com (developer of SuperDuper, a primo Mac backup app):

"Specifically, FW maintains speed bidirectionally, and doesn't 'step down' its performance to very low levels when slower devices are connected (because each drive is at least FW400). Bidirectional transfers (read and write) can occur simultaneously, too, at full speed.

On top of that, each FW device is 'smart', and transfers between devices are handled by the device, without mediation by the host.

FW 'power' is more reliable and higher, so bus powered devices tend to operate better.

Because there are 'more' devices with USB connections, there are more opportunties for bus disruption, slowdowns and failures.

Finally, a FW port is a FW port. On laptops and the like, some of the USB ports are 'high power', some are not, and users can get confused. (Yes, there's FW800 and FW400, but they're explicity different ports, even though you can use an adapter.)"

I use bus-powered FW external drives to incrementally clone my Mac lappies....USB 2.0 is simply inferior at this point for this task.

What sucks about firewire is that there are both normal and mini connectors with different features. My laptop has the mini-firewire connector and those do not provide bus power. And the USB power isn't enough to power a regular 3.5" hdd. They should've specified in the firewire specs that all computer based host ports must be powered (full size) if there is a power source that allows it (eg 19v battery). Some 3rd party company came up with some high-power usb port that uses slightly different connector and special cables but that solution just takes twice the space of normal USB and is rather clumsy. Another potential suckage with firewire is the afaik uncontrolled direct memory access that's been on the news lately allowing for example: easy debugging, stealing memory contents and quickly equipping machines with rootkits.

brich said:

Ion Todirel said:

*snip*

On the Mac side where Windows bios concerns re external booting are not a concern, the ability to backup to an external Firewire drive is a superior alternative to USB2 for any number of reasons, including these provided by Dave Nanian of shirt-pocket.com (developer of SuperDuper, a primo Mac backup app):

"Specifically, FW maintains speed bidirectionally, and doesn't 'step down' its performance to very low levels when slower devices are connected (because each drive is at least FW400). Bidirectional transfers (read and write) can occur simultaneously, too, at full speed.

On top of that, each FW device is 'smart', and transfers between devices are handled by the device, without mediation by the host.

FW 'power' is more reliable and higher, so bus powered devices tend to operate better.

Because there are 'more' devices with USB connections, there are more opportunties for bus disruption, slowdowns and failures.

Finally, a FW port is a FW port. On laptops and the like, some of the USB ports are 'high power', some are not, and users can get confused. (Yes, there's FW800 and FW400, but they're explicity different ports, even though you can use an adapter.)"

I use bus-powered FW external drives to incrementally clone my Mac lappies....USB 2.0 is simply inferior at this point for this task.

It's nice how something I regard as a flaw (No backward compatibility without a special adapter) is interpreted as a benefit by others.  Other feature he describes as good - like much of the bus logic handled by the device - also have drawbacks, like the fact that a peripheral manufacturer has to put a lot more work into creating a FW device, which necessarily means that you have a smaller market of devices. Ease of developing USB devices means there are more problematic devices causing disruptions, but also means there is more variety in the market.

Just goes to show there's no One Best Standard in this either.

Yggdrasil said:

brich said:

*snip*

It's nice how something I regard as a flaw (No backward compatibility without a special adapter) is interpreted as a benefit by others.  Other feature he describes as good - like much of the bus logic handled by the device - also have drawbacks, like the fact that a peripheral manufacturer has to put a lot more work into creating a FW device, which necessarily means that you have a smaller market of devices. Ease of developing USB devices means there are more problematic devices causing disruptions, but also means there is more variety in the market.

Just goes to show there's no One Best Standard in this either.

When it comes to reliably cloning my entire computing environment, I'll sacrifice variety for competent, known reliability every time. I obtain my FW devices from Other World Computing. Their FW solutions are well defined and it's easy to confirm compatibility with one's existing lappie setup. In the past 5 years, I haven't experienced any 'suckage' with FW on multiple systems with multiple external devices. That said, I don't use it on my XP machine.

brich said:

Yggdrasil said:

*snip*

When it comes to reliably cloning my entire computing environment, I'll sacrifice variety for competent, known reliability every time. I obtain my FW devices from Other World Computing. Their FW solutions are well defined and it's easy to confirm compatibility with one's existing lappie setup. In the past 5 years, I haven't experienced any 'suckage' with FW on multiple systems with multiple external devices. That said, I don't use it on my XP machine.

Well, reliably cloning entire computing environments is just one scenario, which is exactly what I meant when I said that Firewire might be superior for some tasks, and USB for others.

Yggdrasil said:

brich said:

*snip*

Well, reliably cloning entire computing environments is just one scenario, which is exactly what I meant when I said that Firewire might be superior for some tasks, and USB for others.

I totally agree....the right tool for the job....USB2 is fine for many things...it just falls short of FW (especially FW800) for bootable cloning; in fact, several tests I've seen show that USB2 sustained throughput for transfer of...say...40-45 GB of internal data is 30-40% slower than even FW 400 on the same systems. 

My external HD that I use for backups,  that is connected via FW800, then another HD via 400 and a few more via USB2.

Unfortunately, Apple was the only one driving Firewire.

There is a lot less CPU utilization with Firewire, and I generally get better transfer speeds to my Western Digital MyBook using Firewire.

The whole architecture behind Firewire is more efficient than USB...this is one of those cases where the better technology did not win.