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Kanguru Releases First FireWire Flash Drive
hajmola points out this Mac Observer article, which starts "At long last, after years of USB having a corner on the flash drive market, Kanguru has announced its Fire Flash FireWire flash drive line. With capacities ranging from 128MB to 1GB, the Fire Flash is the perfect way to carry your data with you, and since they uses FireWire, you won't be waiting around for the transfer to finish.""
-jim
Well, of course, if you read the parent's Wikipedia link you notice that FireWire 800 exists, which is 786.432 mbps.
Yay.
You're still limited by the speed at which flash memory can be read and written, which is sufficiently less than the speed of a firewire or USB 2.0 port. What's the point?
Nearly every machine has a USB port, but many do not have a firewire port, and of the pc laptops that do, it's usually the little 4 pin ports, which you would need a dongle or adapter for. Why not buy a USB 2.0 drive? It's probably less money, you'll get the same transfer speeds on a box with 2.0 ports, and it will work on nearly every machine on the market.
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I'm afraid you're doing what most users do. You're relaying the error message you thought you saw, and not the actual error message.
USB has negotiation built into it. Initially, a device gets a small amount of power, then it negotiates for more. If it requires more power than is available on the hub, it won't get it. The hub inside standard Mac keyboards doesn't have much power, so some flash drives won't work on it. I've used flash drives that worked on a mac keyboard and some that don't.
So your argument is partially correct. Some flash drives will not work on the hub in mac keyboards or potentially any other unpowered or overloaded hub. But this really is a problem with your drive, and not the USB standard.
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yes, at 480 mbps (as opposed to 400mbps for firewire).
Yes, in theory USB2 can do 480Mbps. In practice it doesn't achieve that kind of speed, it's slightly slower than Firewire 400.
When you recall that Firewire supports isochronous transfers and daisy-chaining, which USB lacks, speed isn't the only advantage.
Now if only Apple could fix the Panther Firewire stack so I could use my Firewire drive stack they way it used to work...
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OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Clearly you haven't tried to actually use USB at those speeds.
There is no question, as far as I know, that Firewire 400 provides better throughput than USB 2.0 in a typical environment (and most non-typical ones as well). Not just better, either. Significantly better. I can attest to this personally. A file that, via USB, takes 3 seconds to copy to the hard drive in my USB2/Firewire400 enclosure, only takes about 1.5 seconds via Firewire. (for those concerned about my testing methods, yes, these are smallish files for a reason. I don't want the drive's maximum to be taken into account. As long as we're only writing to the 8MB cache, we should be fine.
Anyway, yeah. Ignore the marketing hype and look at benchmarks. USB 2.0 -- replacing the Mhz myth with the Mbps myth.
Random and weird software I've written.
No it isn't.
Wiebetech had a Firewire Keychain flash firewire drive back in 2002.
Check it out: