Firewire or Gigabit Ethernet?

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?"

Comments

Bandwidth is not the only answer!!

[Lally Singh]

This is really a sickening question. Just because something sends a certain number of bits over a wire in a given timeframe doesn't mean it's equivalent to everything else with the same data rate.

Firewire and Ethernet have two very different applications and are designed accordingly. Do you want to give your external hard drives, digital cameras, and iPods IP addresses? Do you want to have to worry about firewalling & routing for you iPod? How would you coordinate the caches of two different machines using the same disk? If you don't want to do that, do you want to worry about some sort of locking mechanism for the disk, to prevent concurrent access?

Most importantly, just grow up. Silly benchmarks like bandwidth, clock speed, etc., are just useful for comparing objects IN THE SAME CLASS. Maybe /. will one day grow out of their "bandwidth/clockrate == penis size" mentality and actually worry about getting USEFUL PERFORMANCE out of their systems. Sheesh.