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

[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

[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

[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.