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FireWire doomed to niche interface status

@ 2007/06/27

One of the more infamous and contentious threads in the history of the Battlefront was a debate over the relative merits of FireWire and USB 2.0. The original poster wondered what the point of USB 2.0 was when FireWire was already on the market? Fast forward to six years later, and a new report from research firm In-Stat is predicting that FireWire is doomed to be a niche interface.

Comment from Wrigleyvillain @ 2007/06/27

Let us know

Comment from Sidney @ 2007/06/27

I will try to find 150GB .dwg using USB and Firewire sometime next week if possible.

Or, that's about 19 DVD movies

Comment from Wrigleyvillain @ 2007/06/27

Using "standard" Firewire 400 a bit over an hour IIRC (I don't sit there and watch it). Nice when both machines have 800

Much quicker than the busy gigabit network and don't have to copy twice (network file sharing on workstations isn't permitted).

Occurred to me this would probably work to get data from a Mac to a Firewire and HFS+ enabled PC too (running MacDrive or something...)

Comment from Sidney @ 2007/06/27

How long does it take for 150GB data? Like to compare some notes for next week

Comment from Wrigleyvillain @ 2007/06/27

Yes and another benefit I have found absolutely essential in my tech work on Macs is their built-in "Target Disk mode" functionality. Plug any Mac into another via the firewire port and boot it up holding the T key and it's internal HDD mounts on the other machine as if an external. WONDERFUL time saver when needing to clone one machine to another or transfer over 150GB of data when swapping out someone's graphics workstation.

Comment from jmke @ 2007/06/27

daisy chain of Firewire devices is also a nice feature, each device daisy chained as access to the full speed; that's better than eSATA

Comment from Kougar @ 2007/06/27

$1 per port??? No wonder it never took off. USB 2.0 maxes out at aboout 35-40MB/s absolute best case scenario... about how much of Firewire 800's 80MB/s is lost to overhead out of curiosity? I would guess very little?

Another market it was strong in was external hard drives, however with e-sata ports and internal sata to external esata brackets becoming popular IEEE1394 is also beging to erode there as well.

Comment from jmke @ 2007/06/27

Firewire was and is vastly superior to USB 2.0, it was at the beginning, and it still is today, lower CPU usage, can be used as extremely fast network connection between two PCs, delivers enough power over Firewire to power most devices. Really don't like the USB 2.0 only trend :/

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