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FireWire 2 Coming Soon?
Twirlip of the Mists writes "Looks like SmartDisk pulled a Time Canada. IT World reports, 'Several hours after announcing that it is introducing desktop hard drives that connect to Apple Computer Inc. computers using the new high-speed 800M bps (bits per second) FireWire standard, SmartDisk Corp. asked that the news be 'killed due to premature release.'" Sweet.
Not Las Vegas as the report says
So then the question now is what will be updated to include FireWire 2? Will it be the PowerMacs? (Probably, they're due for an update), the iMacs? (my guess is no), or the notebooks (my guess is no again, they were just updated)? Looks like someone goofed up and stole Steve's thunder. Who thinks Steve's going to come down in his rage and smite this SmartDisk company?
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
It's possible that the big surprise at MacWorld everyone's expecting might be a Firewire 2 based storage unit to complement Xserv. And now that Rendevous is available, maybe it'll work with Windows networks too.
It's a better idea than the video IPod, anyways.
Real nerds get their music from Radio 76
Would it really be that much more expensive to pop firewire control electronics on drives instead of ATA or serial ATA?
Firewire 2 would offer enough bandwidth to support any currently available hard disk with room to spare, let alone the current crop of ATA drives. The fact that it's a powered interface, supports long cable lengths, has a small cable diameter, is chainable, etc. all seem to be compelling advantages. The command set, which IIRC is SCSI-like, I'm guessing is an improvement over ATA as well.
I don't really expect to see firewire native drives, but it really does seem that firewire 2 offers a much better solution for connecting disks than SATA - even for internal drives. And having the same connection for internal and external devices would just make everything that much easier.
This raises the following questions:
1. Does this mean there will be hardware updates even though the rumor mill is indicating otherwise?
2. What are the benefits of it when most applications of FireWire do not use its full capacity now? Does than mean some cool new tech?
I hope the answers are yes, huge, yes. We'll see tomorrow.
Boom Shanka
Faster Firewire + Rendezvous means now there is an easy and cheap way to set up a home network of Macs, Printers, Scanners, iPods, and whatever else Apple would like to sell.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
There's so many things wrong with what you just said.
1. It's Xserve, not Xserv.
2. Xserve RAID, the companion storage device you speak of, has been known to have a 2Gbps Fibre Channel interface for some time now.
3. I don't even know what you mean by throwing Rendezvous (not Rendevous) in, since that doesn't really mean anything in the context of enterprise storage; nor do I know what you mean by saying "maybe it'll work with Windows networks", since Mac OS X Server allows Windows clients to connect just fine (and connects to Windows servers just fine), so obviously, it will work fine with Windows networks, and neither the way storage connects to a server, nor Rendezvous, have anything to do with it.
4. It's iPod, not IPod.
SmartDisk FirePower will be demonstrated at SmartDisk's booth at MacWorld Expo in Las Vegas this week
I dont get how these mistakes get made. Don't theyse guys have editors?!?
Yep, he is probably pretty steamed. This is definitely good support for an entire lineup refresh, which was already sort of announced when SJ said all new hardware in Jan, 2003 would only boot in MacOS X.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
there's another macworld this week in vegas? they have been busy over there at apple, haven't they?
My guess is they meant SmartDisk's booth at CES (Consumer Electronics Show, IIRC), which is going on this week in Vegas.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
...IDC analyst Roger Kay said Monday. Kay is unimpressed with the promise of Firewire2. "I don't know what we need it for. FireWire is really fast already, and data is only as fast as your slowest link -- your PC or your modem or cable line."
Is this for real? "Umm... faster disks, no, nobody needs faster disks." Followed by, "and 640K is plenty!"?
Firewire2 is only as fast as ATA/100, which is already being superceded by Serial-ATA. That it can guarantee those transfers on a long-cable daisy-chain or star bus is why it's amazing. If PCI has trouble feeding it, we have a 6.4 GB/s bus on the horizon for this summer. This spec is going to have to last at least 4 years.
And who's implementing virtual memory over modem lines these days? What is this guy talking about?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Couldn't it be that the new Firewire2 will be used in a new iPod, perhaps the one that is supposed to play video? Since video is on the magnitude of gigs rather than the megs of audio, could this new Firewire standard be made purely for this new device? Or would an iPod be a hardware version of a killer app for the standard?
New Xserve and XRAID with firewire 2, 800Mbps for RAID makes sense. And those who need that much RAID can afford the new technology.
Video iPod, unlikely. Color iPod, maybe. More likely to see something that allows us to connect our Macs full of mp3s to our stereo over Airport.
I am hoping for an 802.11g Card with built in BlueTooth. This would allow Apple to sell BT Mice and Keyboards, and allow ALL recent Macs a cheap upgrade to BT! Also new base station.. maybe it will have a few surprises!
Tim
-- Steal Me --
The FireWire 2 specs out at 800 Mbps over copper cables like the current ones, and 3.2 Gbps over fiber optic cable. This is more than enough to compete with Serial-ATA for internal drives.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
"Looks like SmartDisk pulled a Time Canada."
SmartDisk didn't pull a TimeCanada, they pulled an iMac .
Get it? Ok, maybe not. It was a bad pun. I'm sorry.
Does it really matter? Can an IDE drive's read/write throughput be fast enough to ever fill up that kind of bandwidth?
I read this:
:)
FireWire2 is the next generation of the Apple-invented standard. It supports data transfer at 800M bps and is backwards-compatible with computers and peripherals that support FireWire 1. It also works with USB (universal serial bus) 2.0-equipped Windows PCs.
And had to scratch my head. Do they really mean that FireWire2 is also compatible with USB?!?
Maybe they'll call it FIR-USB and all the devices will be round. (But will they be dog-slobber proof?
It's already been a month and a half sicne Lacie announced I seem to remember reading a while back that Lacie announce Firewire 2 drives, but never gave an acttual product announcement, they also didn't point out when apple would be releasing capable machines, which seems to be the big deal about this.
but it has to be said
In Soviet Russia, the articles Lone-Gunman-Are-Dead YOU!!
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The Consumer Electronics Show is in Vegas this week. Looks like someone got mixed up.
I seriously doubt apple will ever use USB 2.0 in any product. Its just a bad idea all together - nothing good about it in any way - Firewire 0wnz j00r b0n3z that is if your name is USB2.0. That and why would they advocate another companies high speed data transfer technology when they have their own better implementaion. Yes I know they jumped onto USB(and made it what it is today) but thats slow speed - they had nothing and intel already did the dirty work.
You're getting it wrong. The Blue and White G3s and Yikes machines didn't have an internal firewire port: The Sawtooth did. This port was removed on the dual-processor Gigabit ethernet machines that followed. For confirmation of this, check out http://www.apple-history.com.
A good hard drive in a Firewire enclosure will IN NO WAY give you full saturation. ATA/100 (or 133) don't run at 100 (or 133) MB/S in real life
Are you confusing Bits and Bytes? I can reliably pull 40MB/s off of a modern disk. Firewire runs at 400Mb/s. small b. Multiply by 8 and throw in a couple for protocol overhead and you've maxed the Firewire (400) bus.
Now, add to that the fact that Firewire isn't a point-to-point link like ATA, it's a bus. Every device attached to your computer has to share the bandwidth, be it 400 or 800. So, add a video source and write it to two disks (say an OSX software disk mirror) and you're bumping up over 400Mb/s.
Now the geek will say, "just add another firewire controller card and multiplex the writes over two busses." But Apple is creating powerful computing solutions for non-geeks.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
be sure to visit this page to read my extensive summary of the current Macworld rumors, and updates/forecasts following the show
like the move to 1394b at this year's MWSF couldn't have been foreseen from the firewire news of last year? and like our old 1394a peripherals will bring the 1394b bus down to 1394a speed anyway, and individual disks have trouble saturating 1394a, so what does it much matter? and like 802.11g is already out from d-link, so why shouldn't apple be using it already? and like i expect 802.11g will *still* be disrupted by my 2.4 GHz portable phone, so who cares? (like people should use 802.11a which is at 5 GHz instead). and like bluetooth is builtin to my 8 month old laptop, so why isn't apple doing this already?
It's available now!
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Anyone else posted via Safari yet?
Pooty tweet
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Apple's new OPEN SOURCE browser based off KHTML from KDE.
Pooty tweet
USB rules!!! Firewire sucks! Who uses this crap besides Apple. I'll stick with USB, thank you.
Note which graphics cards are in the new 12" and 17" Powerbooks. And all iMacs and eMacs. And standard on all PowerMacs. They all use some sort of Geforce card. The only Macs that don't have NVidia anywhere are the iBook and 15" Powerbook, and that's probably because they didn't have a Mac-compatible GeForce4Go to use when they last upgraded them. Next speed bump, they'll all have GF4Go GPUs. I wouldn't be too surprised if the Radeon 9000 disappears from the PowerMac BTO options in the future.
Getting even more offtopic:
The only reason I can see Apple going with a GF4Go 440 in their ultra-high-end 17" laptop is Steve. Everything I've seen on the PC side of things says that the Radeon 9000 Mobility is faster than the GF4Go 440, and natively supports DirectX 9, including all the pixel shaders and stuff that Doom 3 will practically require (GF4Go doesn't). Why Apple would spare no expense in making the best Mac laptop and then give it the second-place graphics chip makes no sense.