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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.
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.
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.
Firewire is NOT designed to replace networking. It's a short-range peripheral connection system.
:p
There are a number of different media types that IEEE 1394x can use. But for full-speed of 800Mbps or 1.6Gbps, only STP (short twisted-pair) or expensive multi-mode fiber can be used.
Yes, there are experiments implementing IP over firewire, but nobody is advocating that it replace any kind of Ethernet solution.
Now, on the otherhand, Rendezvous could make Ethernet replace Firewire as a way of connecting peripherals. At some point soon, rendezvous-on-a-chip will make it easy for scanner manufacturers, for example, to allow a scanner to merely be plugged in to an ethernet network and use zero-conf IP to move data.
Think about it:
State-of-the-art ethernet is at 1Gbps full-duplex, with very flexable (& cheap!) cabling requirements. I'm really surprised that nobody is using this signalling technology for peripherals. 1Gbps is faster than even the 800Mbps that 1394b will advertize.
It's the complex interplay of different technology layers, and how to get them to work toegether, that makes this tricky. At the signalling level, i.e. bits on copper or glass, you've got various ethernets, usb, firewire.
Next, how you arrange for multiple devices to share access to the copper or glass; again you've got different methods with ethernets, usb, or firewire.
And then what protocol arranges the bits together to convey information. Firewire and USB include specifications for time-sensitive bits (isochronous) and bus management that ethernet doesn't provide... instead, in networks other protocol layers take care of device discovery and congestion etc.
Which combination of layers is best for various applications has yet to be proven. And they're all moving targets, too!
Once you get up around 1Gbps, the bottleneck is assembling the data to feed to the wire -- if the packets aren't made much bigger, you have to have hefty CPU power to pump that many tiny packets per second and reassemble them...
and now I'm just rambling.
- Peter
INsigNIFICANT