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

USB 2.0 is faster

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, isn't USB 2.0 faster than firewire?

Re:USB 2.0 is faster

[j1m 5n0w]

Uh, isn't USB 2.0 faster than firewire?

yes, at 480 mbps (as opposed to 400mbps for firewire).

-jim

Re:USB 2.0 is faster

[Tumbleweed]

Technically, but not really. USB 2.0 is 480Mbps, Firewire (IEEE1394.a) is 400, but due to latency and protocol issues, Firewire is almost always faster, often _much_ faster than USB 2.0.

That doesn't even include IEEE1394.b, which is 800Mbps. Unfortunately, these devices aren't of the newer flavour of FireWire.

You will also certainly find major speed differences in different sets of USB & FireWire chips & drivers, so you'd have to benchmark the things to find out for sure.

Re:USB 2.0 is faster

[LincolnQ]

Well, of course, if you read the parent's Wikipedia link you notice that FireWire 800 exists, which is 786.432 mbps.

Yay.

Re:USB 2.0 is faster

[2nd Post!]

No, though as another helpful poster has linked, USB 2.0 is specced higher than Firewire.

Is a Volvo S60 faster than a Ford Expedition? Well, it depends on usage right? Freeway? Off road? In a river?

But in usage tests, Firewire is faster. Feel free to buy USB2, of course, but you're only cheating yourself in most situations!

Re:USB 2.0 is faster

[j1m 5n0w]

True (though it uses a different, backwards compatible, 9 pin connector). Alas, the flash drive's specifications list its maximum speed as 400mbps.

Re:USB 2.0 is faster

[mewyn]

Not only that, but take a look at your CPU usage during bulk transfers. On my 1.25GHz PowerBook, I see 25% CPU usage on bulk transfers with USB 2.0 while i see < 5% CPU usage with FireWire. This is on the same drive, same hardware.

Also, I have noticed that transfers take about 25% more time when I use USB over FireWire.

Now, about this little device, I myself, being a heavy FireWire advocate do not see a major use for it. In a flash drive, I want the ability to use it everywhere, and many machines I am around have no FireWire (grr!). Although, I would get one if all the machines I'm exposed to had FireWire.

Re:USB 2.0 is faster

[bill_mcgonigle]

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...

Re:USB 2.0 is faster

[Cecil]

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.

Re:USB 2.0 is faster

[2nd Post!]

Uh, you really don't know?

Your points are not the parent AC's points. His was "USB2 is faster than Firewire" and your points are "USB2 is more ubiquitous and fast enough."

If you use the parent AC's belief that USB2 is faster than Firewire and purchase accordingly, you will be disappointed because in fact Firewire is faster.

If you buy using your points, that USB2 is more ubiquitous and fast enough then of course you won't be disappointed because it's true.

I've enjoyed a nice healthy 16mb/s from my iPod, a good 3.5mb/s from my camcorder, and 35mb/s from my external firewire drive for two years+ now. Yes, each device IS more expensive than what USB would have cost, but at the time I bought the camcorder there was no real alternative, when I bought my Firewire drive we only had external USB1 drives, and when I bought my iPod we only had USB1 Nomads as the competition, so if I paid a premium it was because there was no USB2 to drive prices down.

If you like, you can also see it as Firewire driving the USB backers to release a faster spec to stay competitive, but in the end all consumers win with choice, price competition, and variety.

Re:USB 2.0 is faster

[jerde]

I've enjoyed a nice healthy 16mb/s from my iPod[...]

Man, 16 millibits per second? That would take YEARS to transfer one song! Poor guy. :p

(This post brought to you by the Association for the Correct Capitalization of Abbreviations)

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.

Re:The Catch

[OldMiner]

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.

Re:The Catch

[Bastian]

Hey, don't blame them for 4-pin FW ports. Me, I blame all the cheap-ass PC users who push manufacturers to cut costs by any means necessary, including emasculating an otherwise far superior bus technology.

The amount power you can send over a 6-pin FireWire bus is one of its greatest assets. I've had four external FireWire hard drives daisy-chained off of one FW port without having to resort to an external power source. Granted, God Save You if you try to transfer data from two of those drives at once, but with USB I've never even seen one drive work without an external power source.

I imagine the next great innovations we'll get from Dell and company will include mice that speak to the computer using BlueTooth but get their power from 110V A/C, optical drives where you spin the media with a hand crank, and MP3 players that have no internal storage but can grab music from SMB shares using the convenient ethernet port.

Re:The Catch

[jeif1k]

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.

FW is spec'ed to supply much more power to devices than USB. That's probably the reason why designers don't like to put powered FW ports on laptops in the first place, and that's only going to get worse as laptops get lighter and more power efficient.

Marketing gimmick

[austad]

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.

Kanguru Is Not The First

[Goo.cc]

Wiebetech had a Firewire Keychain flash firewire drive back in 2002.

Check it out:

• Firewire Keychain Review
• Firewire Keychain
• Wiebetech Announced Firewire Keychain
• WiebeTECH 1GB FireWire KeyChain review