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USB 3.0's New Jacks and Sockets
The Register has a brief look posted (with photos and diagrams) of "USB 3.0, the upcoming version of the universal add-on standard re-engineered for the HD era, made a small appearance at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES)." The posting explains that USB 3.0 "wasn't demonstrated in operation, but we did get to see what the new connectors look like." How does it handle backward compatibility? The extra pins needed for USB 3.0 "are placed behind the USB 1.1/2.0 ones. USB 3.0 connectors and receptacles will be deeper than the current ones."
Did they make a P2P version so that I don't need a computer to connect a camera to a hard drive and have it work?
Yes, they did. Several years ago, in fact. It's called USB On the Go
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Funny how I just upgraded to a new computer that uses SATA 3.0Gb/s. If USB3 is faster than SATAII, then why not just use that for drives? Not that anyone ever really maxes out SATAII to begin with. So it's all kind of useless in the end.
The problem with SATA, IMHO, is that makes a shoddy external connector. There is no notion of hubs or even daisy-chaining. USB and Firewire both support hubs, whereas Firewire supports daisy-chaining. With SATA you need as many external SATA sockets on your computer as you have external SATA drives. If your main computer is a portable, then this is a poor solution.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I've seen SATAII hubs before.
Here's one that I found with a couple seconds of googling: http://www.cooldrives.com/sahub5muussi.html
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Rob Flynn
Pidgin
Yes, and no.
You see, 480 Mbs is the electrical interface speed. As in, 480 Million bits go across the wire every second. Not all of those bits are used for traffic.
However, some of those bits are used by the overhead of the transfer protocol. You've got USB packets in the stream which do nothing but reserve space for some psuedo-realtime device which might be connected to the bus at any second. Whether or not the OS/USB Controller allocates these blank packets even in cases where they aren't needed is a matter of programming.
As an aside, I've noticed that on the same computer, with the same flash drive, Linux does a much faster job with file transfers than Windows. I suspect Windows is just under-utilizing the bus, to make it easier for their engineers. But I could be wrong, as I haven't looked into it in detail.
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So they're going with a 3.0 instead of some crazy More Full Speed (TM) name this time?
FTA:
Dubbed SuperSpeed USB, the third major incarnation of the serial bus standard is set to deliver data transfer speeds of around 4.7Gb/s - ten times today's 480Mb/s limit.
They haven't TM'd it yet though.
Nobody... The problem with firewire is its cost-- USB is, on the device side, dirt cheap to implement. This comes at the cost of needing a host controller (your computer) to do anything and that comes with CPU use overhead. Firewire requires these 'controllers' in every device, making it far more useful (allowing things such as communication without a computer!), robust, and fast without the overhead. But it costs more! And, as we know, price is what drives the marketplace. As a 'normal' uniformed consumer, would you buy a firewire 400 widget for $100 if the usb version cost $50 and both "did the same thing" and ran at a theoretical "480 mbps" (And we all (by all, I mean us on slashdot) know how well usb2 does that...). As a 'normal' consumer, of course not!
;))... Sony has been shipping 1394 on its vaio computers for ages (in the form of i.link), and all modern computer manufactures have followed suit.
Firewire is far from dead, however... Nearly all consumer/prosumer mini dv cameras use it (including hdv cameras), many set top boxes and HDTVs have 1394 links on them for connecting devices (DVHS decks, HDTVs, and cable boxes... this transport MPEG-2 transport streams), and every mac since the iMac debuted has shipped with firewire ports on it (Many, many external hard drives have firewire ports on them.. the good ones anyways
So, to answer your question, consumers "killed" firewire by being... well... price conscious consumers. But in reality it's not going anywhere, and with any luck and all the cool networking capabilities the firewire spec has these days it will eventually catch on with the majority of consumers as a convenient way to interconnect devices and stick around for good.
appleguru.org
Umm, you do realize that USB 1.0 and 2.0 use the exact same cables and connectors, don't you?
Just asking, because you sound too serious to be joking.
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
Your windows file copy slowness could be because Windows does not use write caching for removable drives. This allows clueless users to just yank out the disk without unmounting properly. If you are getting slow reads, that is a different story.
Microsoft actually supported Firewire before getting USB complete, particularly USB 2.0, where the two standards overlap in certain areas. While Firewire was invented by Apple, Microsoft also actually delivered support for IP over Firewire first (several years first), although I doubt many people used it on Windows because most PCs that have Firewire only have the 4-pin, non-powered version like Sony's iLink. Mini-to-mini Firewire cables are not too common.
Apple didn't support IP over Firewire networking until around 10.3.5 IIRC. Now that it's there, it is actually quite useful on Macs as a secondary network interface, since all modern Macs have FW400 and many now have FW800 too. Macs also have smart enough firmware to use Firewire in Target Mode, which is a significant feature other PCs won't match anytime soon.
The new FW3200 uses the same connector as FW800, an advantage over the different and more complex USB 3.0 connector.
Another advantage of Firewire is that it provides higher voltage for charging, so it can power more significant devices and can recharge devices faster. It's noticiably faster to charge iPods/iPhone over Firewire. The 30-pin Dock Connector has Firewire compatible pins for charging, even though modern iPods don't support Firewire for data exchange.
There's really no reason for Apple to drop Firewire, and it will be difficult for PC makers to match the features of Macs even when including Firewire ports on their PCs. Not only do BIOS PCs lack any firmware support for target mode use, but Microsoft dropped IP over Firewire in Vista (!). USB 3.0 might bump the speed for new devices, but it doesn't match the Firewire-related features that exist now, and doesn't match the throughput of FW3200, which is also in the pipeline.
Ten Big Predictions for Apple in 2008
What's Apple going to be up to in 2008? The previous article looked at clues from the Newton MessagePad to the iPhone. Here's a look at the potential future of the rest of Apple's businesses, from hardware to software to services.