Firewire or Gigabit Ethernet?

Posted by Cliff on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @04:30AM from the why-not-use-both dept.

schvenk asks: "Firewire (IEEE 1394) has been accepted as a standard for peripherals, from hard drives to CD-RW drives to digital video cameras. It's a 400 Mbps technology. At the same time, many machines are shipping with Gigabit Ethernet, a 1000 Mbps equivalent of an more widely accepted standard. I'm not a hardware guy, but at first glance it would seem more efficient to eliminate Firewire altogether and equip peripherals with Ethernet ports, ultimately moving all wired communication to a unified standard. Am I missing something?"

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Where do you see the Gigabit ports? by Alpha27 · 2002-01-23 04:39 · Score: 1, Interesting

I haven't seen a machine with a gigabit port, unless you're referring to some of the larger scale servers that are out there that require that amount of bandwidth capacity. As for why not just transition to gigabit and skip the firewire, I believe it comes down to cost. The gigabit setup is quite expensive. Go to radio shack to buy an optical cable and it'll run you $20 dollars. Gigabit ethernet uses the same media as optical cable. I'm sure there's a price issue even in the hardware that connects it all together as well.