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.""

Comments

The Catch

[MBCook]

That's nice and all (I prefer FireWire over USB myself), but it would be useless to me. The problem is powering the thing. Sure, 6 pin firewire ports are powered. But what about me? My computer has a 4 pin port (which I'm not happy about). So how do I use it? There is no power from the port. There is no plug on the device for a way to plug it into a USB or PS/2 port to get power. The only way I can think of is a firewire Y cable sort of thing I have. You plug the device needing power in one end, the computer in another, and then you plug the third end into a wallwart (not unlike the iPod's one). So much for portable.

So as nice as this is, it's not for everyone. USB really is superior for this task because of this (IMHO). I have never seen or heard of an unpowered USB port. And if such a thing exists, I don't think it is up to spec because (unlike FW) I think that all USB ports are require to be able to power something (not pass-though ports though).

Still, neat to see. Now if we could just lose the 4 pin FW ports. The connectors are bad enough on their own. Redesign it, and and power to it.