Re: Are "eSATA drives + enclosures" the ONLY way to get fast ext drives?

In article <znu-62CFFA.13115705012009@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
ZnU <znu@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article <mr-FD356E.09230305012009@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Sandman <mr@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article <znu-C9E87C.02543905012009@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
ZnU <znu@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

With Intel's power in the chipset market, they can make a new
interface
a standard hardware feature practically on a whim. FireWire's days
have
probably always been numbered, because it was always just a matter of
time until Intel did that with an interface good enough to replace
it.

It might have been able to avoid this fate if it had really caught on
in
the consumer electronics world, but despite widespread expectations
this
never really happened except with camcorders. And they're moving away
from FireWire now as well, because the move to file-based rather than
tape-based recording means that FireWire's advantages over USB for
real-time video streaming are irrelevant.

Not needing realtime isn't an argument for slower transfers. In fact,
batch copies need to be fast because they're part of the video
workflow.

I have a Canon HG10. Between downloading the video over USB and
transcoding to remove interlacing, it's way too much of a hassle to
use.

The ability to stream reliably is separate from transfer rate. If you're
reading video from tape or capturing it live or otherwise receiving it
in real-time from a source which can't instantly pause if the interface
hiccups and can't easily re-send lost data, reliable streaming is
extremely important. FireWire was designed with this in mind. USB really
wasn't.

If you're reading data from random access media like a hard drive or
flash card, on the other hand, it's no problem if your transfer is more
"bursty". So the move away from tape has made USB a viable choice for
this application.

Anyway, USB2 can transfer video from consumer camcorders far faster than
real-time. You're looking at data rates mostly in the 3-5 MB/s range.
USB2 is much faster than that.

I think it needs to be said here that ZnU has been a *HUGE* FireWire
supporter through the years. While it may seem like he is "blindly"
advocating USB here, it comes from someone who - like me - has started
to understand that the future isn't FW anymore. I.e. the benefits of
FW aren't as valid today as yesterday.

Yup.

The short version of why I've changed my mind:

- USB3 has a transfer rate that will match or exceed (even given USB's
higher overhead) the fastest FireWire spec (FW3200). Or even in the
worst case, come close enough that it's still more than fast enough for
virtually everything.

- USB3 has a much better chance of actually getting implemented than
that FW3200 spec, and even if Apple did decide to implement FW3200,
they'd almost certainly be the only ones (in the mainstream computer
market, anyway), whereas USB3 is likely going to be ubiquitous in three
years, which means more devices and lower prices.

- For those increasingly rare cases where stream-based rather than
packet-based transfer is still a major advantage, USB3 is going to have
a stream mode. It's also full duplex like FW800.

- USB's CPU overhead is increasingly irrelevant as more and more systems
sit around with idle cores most of the time.

- FireWire's unique features, like its P2P abilities, have never really
amounted to anything in the general purpose computing market. About the
only thing you can do with FW that you can't do with USB on the desktop
is use it for networking. But this is virtually never done, because
gigabit ethernet is, unsurprisingly, much more practical for general
purpose networking.

I agree with all of the above, sans this one. The Macbook air is a
perfect example of where Firewire would have been the better choice
for the current generation. As you know, the USB port on the Air is
non-standard in order to drive power to the external Superdrive. With
firewire, this would not have been a problem at all, and a standard
fw400 port would have been able to drive a DVD-DL burner. I should
knot, I have one of those :)

So that's a FW unique feature (for the current generation) that
actually does amount to something. The networking part I agree on,
however.


--
Sandman[.net]
.

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