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Firewire Harddrives
schmack writes "VST Technologies have recently released FireWire Harddrives. They look fantastic in stunning red and yellow with that swell FireWire image on them. They perform pretty good too -- 400Mbps transfer rate, you don't need a power supply if you're not connecting more than one [FireWire will provide enough juice] and they come in 2, 4 and 6 GIG configurations.
Still, $500 for 6Gb is a bit steep. $406 can get you 25Gb of IDE hard disk.
--ac
USB 2.0 will be much slower than Firewire, about 250Mbps, and it's still vapour. Basically it's one of those typical boring Intel inventions.
FireWire can be hooked up quicker to a laptop or desktop without a phillips screwdriver, brackets, screws..so what if Ultra2 SCSI is faster? At current speed, I am guessing FireWire is usefull for mobile computing and not for RAID arrays, ftp sites, search engine servers. Ultra2 'bandwidth' makes less sense on the road I guess.
Firewire would be just great if the storage device was a RAID box with a big RAM buffer so you could just lob data at it and let the discs catch up later. A big CCD camera that produces data in squirts could really fly with a disc pack like that. I want one!
I read also that the type of USB-2 cable, connector, .. is not proven yet, and one or two, dunno, of the people that took part in inventing Firewire while working at Apple, said after the Intel press conference USB-2 announce, that what according to Intel was good enough was going to fail in more situations than USB-1, IDE, SCSI.. longshot.
I was surprised to read in storagereview.com that Firewire is actually a subset of the SCSI-3 standard! I guess we should think of Firewire as SuperDuper Ultra-Narrow SCSI-3 ;-)
But with FireWire, no concerns over termination, no worries about conflicting IDs..guess it's just 'cause i'm a Mac user but I like things simple. I live my computing life using KISS (Keep it simple, stupid) It's served me this long, why can't it keep on going?
From what I've experienced, scsi isn't all that flexible, 7 devices per card, short cable limits.. great medium alrdigt
but still, $200 for twenty things to carry around, or 50% more for one thing to carry around
besides, not long and the 50% will drop quite a bit too
naaa, SSA is much better than scsi
unfortunately there is a price premium
>configure such a system and
> get decent performance would be near impossible > without SCSI.
once again, SSA would be much easier
http://www.storage.ibm.com/storage/oem/ssa.htm
Thanks for the link.
Anyone know of any driver projects for free*nx,
or even the not free ones for that matter ?
then I guess I did something I wasnt supposed to =)
I had a friend that had a scsii zip and another that had a scsii jazz and I used to hook them to my scsii card as external devices when they wanted me to burn cds from stuff they had on disk. My card had automatic active termination that would sense a drive on the external interface and allow it to be the terminating end of the chain.
Don't mean to be a grammar Nazi, but that was just awful.
Yes, you are trying to be a grammar nazi. No, it wasn't just awful.
Well it is.
I called VST Tech Support and these drives only have drivers available for Mac at the time. They are working on Windows, and they weren't sure about supporting other platforms.
I don't think active termination has anything to do with it (as an aside, I've had problems with the active termination of Jaz drives, so I set it to manual). I used to hot swap SCSI drives all the time, but apparently I was damn lucky I never lost any data.
You can hot-swap drives and often get away with it, but because SCSI (with the exception of Ultra3 is hotswapable, and Firewire is a subset of Ultra3) is not designed to be hot swapable, you're taking a gamble.
IIRC, you can get 255 SCSI devices on a chain if you set your LUNs up correctly. It's not common to do so, but it is possible.
A lot of aspects of SCSI are voodoo as you say. This is probably one of them.
The only damned thing I care about here is, does firewire run on Linux? Doing a web search I only found one site doing development:
http://eclipt.uni-klu.ac.at/ieee1394/
But it's really hard to tell if they actually have anything working. Anyone know if you, in principle, can boot off of a firewire drive?
I'm not sure where you get the idea that Mac users pay 2-4 times more than PC users for anything. Especially when Mac's service life is nearly twice as long as that of PC's (I base this on standard educational upgrade plans PC's 3 years, Macs 5 years)
The FireWire dirive is not expected to compete in aywhere near the same market as cheap IDE drives, which by the way work just fine in any Mac from the past two years. That dirve is *external* and super-portable. Let me see an external IDE drive let alone one that will fit in my shirt pocket.
Also, this is just the beginning of FireWire technology. There is no where for any of this to go but cheaper and faster. Check out MacTell's website for more Firewire drives.
you seem to imply that these hard drives are mac-only. umm.. hey, look, you can reformat the drive and it will work under windows.
why don't you like firewire? is it just because apple owns it, or the liscencing model, or what? Firewire is pretty smart, and a large step toward the "utopian" data transfer protocol you envision.
Uh, FireWire is just SCSI over a different
physical transport. It is a complement to SCSI,
not a rival.
Since there aren't any native FireWire drives in production yet, the only option at the moment is to use a FireWire-to-IDE bridge chip.
VST chose to use 2.5" notebook hard drives in order to make a small (apparently shirt-pocket size) and rugged unit capable of being powered entirely by the FireWire power rail. This is the reason for the poor performance.
Other companies are making FireWire hard drives based on 3.5" IDE disks with significantly better performance. Yesterday I even saw that one company is selling a kit with everything but the drive so you can build your own. (Sorry, can't remember the URL)
there is for Linux and FreeBSD, dunno about NetBSD and OpenGBSD. Checkout project pages..
My Jaz 2GB is about as fast as that drive..
In fact the JAZ's can barely read at 4.5 megs per second, I know, I'm using it to dump video
at 150K per frame, using Iomega's own BUZ/SCSI board..
Its a nice combination, but on my 66Mhz bus
with a P166, the Buz can encode at a max of 40K
per frame, and decode at 200K per frame (150K
tops using my system with the Jaz)..
By the way a Jaz with a 2 Gig cartridge costs
about 300 dollars.. The BUZ is 200 dollars
and serves as a 10 meg per second Fast-SCSI
interface.. Its also recognized as a
Advansys SCSI card in Linux..
Just for your information..
Kiernan
every day. Do you doubt its value, even if it's not upgradeable?
BRIGHT YELLOW??? I'll NEVER buy one of these unless they ship with a less exagerated color. And no, no 'paint it' comments. Painting harddisks is evil, period.
Yeah, they essentially are crippled by lame 4200RPM drives. Whether this was because of idiocy, cost saving or power saving (they can get power from the firewire bus) it does suck. Mactell is doing a nicer job on their Firepower drives http://www.firewpower.com which have up to 7200RPM mechanisms. Still not taking advantage fully of firewire, but no single drive mechanism will, any more than any single mechanism can take advantage of high-end SCSI buses. However, stick together a couple high end drives and you can have a fast RAID on a single firewire bus. With really good RAID software, the isochronous features of firewire could make this very cool. Firewire's going to speed way up in the future, and the prices of these drives will drop - better values will come.
Errr make that http://www.firepower.com/
Actually no, it doesn't beat Jazz at all. These drives are terribly slow in comparison. Jaz uses SCSI interface and pulls sustained rates of 6-7Mb/sec. The firewire drive can only do 5 on a good day. And to top it off they're way overpriced for what is simply a 4200rpm stock standard drive.
SCSI cabling and termination is easy. follow the spec and it works! Unlike IDE - where some devices won't cooperate even with jumpers set according to spec. The jumper settings are usually printed on the drive, no messing with missing docs even when using second-hand stuff.
As for lengths, there is a max length and a minimum distance between devices. Fast scsi won't allow the 8 devices if you follow the length spec.
If that bothers you, use differential scsi.
They are not a priori a bad thing.
They are bad mainly because they are tied to an OS (but now just imagine, if your IDE hard drive would only work with Windows), and maybe because of design brain-damage if you would get too many interrupts.
On the other hand, on a decent OS, you could be able to update the protocol from V90 directly in changing the driver of the OS (and you could revert back), and even get very detailed statistic about the protocol behavior (see if compression works, how many bit/byte errors you get, in which conditions (bandwidth, time of day),...).
They would even not suffer from the internal modem problem "you have to reboot to reinitialize it", because the driver should be able to do that.
IDE being limited with 2 devices per chain can be circumvented by adding additionnal IDE controllers ; considering the exponential increase of disk space 4 IDE ports can be enough (I have personnaly have one 8 GB, two 2 GB, and one 350 MB hard disk. I don't use the 350 Mo anymore, and next time I'd upgrade, necessarily to a >10GB hard disk, I'll put my second 2 GB on a removable rack like the first currently is, and use only one of them at a time -- if I need it).
An IDE removable rack is as cheat as $10-$20, and works with standard hard drives.
The competition of Firewire hard drives are laptops: if you don't have one, they are of course too expensive to consider buying in lieu of, but if you have one, you basically have a hard drive with a 10 Mbps ethernet connection.
esp. with USB 2.0 coming soon with a much faster transfer rate than current 12mbps USB 1.0
Umm, USB 2.0 isn't coming soon..and even when it does it'll still be lacking several of the options firewire brings _today_. By the time USB 2.0 is released, firewire will be chuggin along at 800+Mbps
Face it, Firewire should be the standard.
As production ramps up, and other companies join the fray, the pricing on these drives and other FireWire hard drives will surely drop to at least SCSI level. It's true, no one should write FireWire off because of the performance of these devices. Just wait until a company comes along that targets the high-end of the market, rather than the sneaker-net storage of these devices.
These drives here look like much better performers. The drives max theoretical transfer rate may not be 80MB/sec, but the sustained read/writes are good for a non-array mid-level drive. Too bad they have highend prices.
Even if you have that Cheetah drive stuck to that 80MB/sec U2W card, it will still only produce in the neighborhood of about 15-18MB/sec sustained, probably less. Keep that in mind before you blow off this 50MB/sec Firewire.
Exactly what was said above, most of you have missed the point. It's portable, no external power required (= CONVIENENT!!!), and cute (which is in-line with Mac market demands). A bit on the pricey side, but so are most Mac toys. They'll sell some of these and make money.
What would be even better (and I'm sure will come soon if not already) are drives for use on PC's, to operate under *nix and Windoze. Of course, I'm not sure what the "perfect" interface is, as USB (esp. with USB 2.0 coming soon with a much faster transfer rate than current 12mbps USB 1.0) is as convienent as FireWire and currently more widely accepted and marketed.
The key here is that we need a convienent, universally accepted/compatible, good performer for the price, external accessory interface and prehiphals to use on this interface to solve all of the mirad demands of computer users as we become more mobile (esp. with the coming wireless broadband revolution to take place over the next few years). At some point this interface also has to address internal system requirements too (i.e. we ought to be able to get internal components to run on this same bus/interface).
At some point networking and these interface models will merge so that you will have essentially a single connection model/protocol to harness the capabilities of storage devices, input devices (i.e. keyboard, mouse, scanner, pen), output devices (i.e. monitor, LCD, printer) communication devices (i.e. network, fax) and even processor devices (i.e. CPU, memory) so that more "black box" devices can be sold, sealed-case, and all integrated together simply by plugging them all into a common interface (be it wired and/or wireless). This is inline with the "smart appliance" model where our toasters, video phones, and other consumer electronics will also talk on this common medium and allow everything to share everything (i.e. you plug an additional CPU device into your 'net and suddenly most of your apps will run faster and Joey can now play that new game on the home theater which required more horsepower than you had yesterday).
Utopia. It's gonna come to be, and when it does the days of computers and geeks will have passed on to the days of mass market consumer electronics and the "next big thing" will be on the agenda (i.e. cloning, space travel, etc.).
If you've read this dribble this far, I'd be surprised.
IDE is 2 devices per chain. No competition at all.
IDE drives are cheaper 'cause there's no smarts on the drive itself. It uses precious CPU time to do I/O. Thanks, but no thanks.
IDE doesn't hotswap. Firewire does.
Forget IDE. Let's go to SCSI.
SCSI needs unique IDs for every device on the chain. Firewire negotiates.
SCSI doesn't hotswap. Firewire does.
SCSI is limited to 7 (15) devices in each chain. Firewire is limited(!) to 63. I'm at 7 SCSI now.
SCSI cable lengths are voodoo, and must be shorter the faster you go (increased crosstalk on parallel data lines).
SCSI cables are much more fragile than Firewire.
SCSI cable connector - there're 3 or 4 different ones, aren't there? Firewire has two.
Yes, Firewire is a subset of SCSI - but not the hardware. It's a subset of the SCSI protocol. It says nothing (IIRC) regarding the hardware (I could be wrong on this one).
SCSI requires a computer in the chain.
SCSI termination... ugh. "Let's see... is my internal drive terminated?" "Do I terminate this one, or maybe that one?" Give me a break. Firewire doesn't hassle you with ANY of that. Plug the d*** thing in.
SCSI has big honkin' connectors. Firewire is little bitty. Think Palm.
USB is slow, slow slow.
USB is limited(!) to 127. Firewire loses here.
USB requires a computer in the chain. Firewire doesn't. Firewire is peer-to-peer. I thought we settled this conceptual hash a while back (with p-t-p being better).
Not sure about USB cable lengths.
USB 2.0 is vapor... I don't want to hear, "Wait 'til next year..." That's loser talk.
I personally like the fact that they designed the drives well, rather than slapping a random blob-like translucent blue case on it, like most companies would have done. Although I personally wouldn't buy one, because I never buy first-generation technology, and because those things are ~$300 for the drive, plus ~$100 for me to get the IEEE 1394 card. It's not worth it, although I wouldn't mind trying some o' that SCSI voodoo.
Posted by MC BoB:
Sony makes one, Sony DVMC-DA1 firewire / analog video converter.
You can see it on the Sony site or use this link:
http://www.angelfire.com/tx2/dv/dvmc.html
I really hated to see the article on the Firewire HD's. There goes yet another reason not to buy the ReplayTV box, Damn, I guess now I'll tell myself I'm waiting for an Ethernet Port and HDTV compatability.
MC BoB
keep your internal drives on another scsi bus or on IDE. when you want to change your external devices, simply unload the scsi modules, and
reload them as nescesary. modularity is a good thing. (yes this does imply linux. would not be
surprised if some other OSs could also do it)
ive been doing this for years with my scsi zip drive.
but both the parallel and USB versions can be hot-swapped with ease.
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http://www.adaptec.com/products/index.html#1394
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As far as the 2.5 miles goes if it's fiber optic, then it's not real scsi cables. Your going to have to have some sort of conversion device from electro-magnetic to light then back again.
How about a RAID box built out of IBM's microdrives? Plugs right in, the size of a sandwich, holds more than a gig, can draw power right off the wire... woo hoo!
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
When looking at the specs, you see they spin at 4200 rpm only, and have 12 ms access time. Compare that with decent U2W SCSI drives at 7200 and 1000 rpm with access times of 8 ms and less.
This makes me think they just glued some cheap IDE drives to the FireWire port.
But I have to admit it's nice for transport.
FireWire is still expensive..does anyone know if this is inherent in its design?
ISTR a bit of fuss made a few months ago when Apple announced a new licensing scheme for Firewire.
Those companies that got in on the ground floor a few years ago had to pay $7500 (total) for the tachnology.
Those who only started licensing it recently are having to pay $1 per port and aren't too happy about it.
$1 doesn't sound like much but when you consider that that cost of manufacturing a Firewire port is around 20c (?), the cost of some of the devices that could be made with it (though most of the cheap ones will use USB instead), and the number of these things that some companies could be using it's significant.
and how is firewire than scsi??
firewire is what: 200 or 400Mb/s, scsi is currently at 80MB/s with LVD.
scsi has a sizeable lead.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
They "perform pretty good"? Surely you mean that they perform pretty well.
Don't mean to be a grammar Nazi, but that was just awful.
Those cameras are also computer peripherals. You can hook 'em up directly to the computer and shuffle video back and forth. Most firewire devices are in fact peers (it reminds me of a small LAN), but not all devices can send commands to other devices like a computer or camcorder almost certainly would.
The hotswappableness of the drives (even during transfers) is _very_ nice i hear. Still, my next drive will be SCSI, because I still have room on that bus for internal devices. Might as well make the most of it, you know. I'll get to externals once i fill my drive bays.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Follow the link
This thing is the size of a big wallet and requires nothing but a FireWire cable to plug into it. It's from VST, a company that also makes a lot of notebook accessories and drives. This is not a giant desktop drive for use with digital video, nor is it representative of what a FireWire drive aimed at such a market could do. Get a grip.
It would be nice to find a cheap source for tailgate adapters. Last time I checked, Symbios (now absorbed by LSI Logic) wanted several thousand dollars for the development kit, so I didn't buy one. But the actual chips are under $10, and only need a handful of inexpensive passive components to make them work.
AFAIK, none of the drive vendors are mass producing drives with native 1394 interfaces yet. It's a catch-22; not enough computers have a 1394 port to justify making devices, and there are not enough devices to justify making 1394 a standard interface on computers. Apple and Sony are pushing it, but will they be enough?
We have Intel to blame for this. They claimed that they would support both USB and 1394 in their chip sets, so that both would become ubiquitous. They put USB in, and that has been fairly successful. Now it's hard to buy a computer without a USB interface. But they forgot 1394, probably because they want to push USB 2.
SCSI cabling is such a crock that I'd really like to move all my SCSI devices (such as scanner, DAT drive, and 8x CDR) to 1394. It's too bad there's not a single-chip adapter for SCSI devices like there is for IDE.
And neither will the Orb be. They're not trying to be a standard - if they were, Iomega wouldn't sue anyone who clones their floppies.
:)
Yes, you can't make Zip disks without permission from Iomega. Part of the agreement details you have to agree to Iomega's price fixing. That is one reason Zip disks still cost about $10 each [*cough* *sputter*].
Give me CD-RW (which I have) and DVD-RAM (which I want). They may not be "THE" standrd, but they ARE standards, so anyone can follow them, so I can happily roll around in 50 cent blank CD's. I need another CD rack now!
I know what you reall meant about standards.. I'm just trying to point out the difference between a standard and a monopoly -- just like Windows is the "standard" while UNIX is "a" standard.
If you have a choice, investigate alternatives to Zip/Orb... portable CD-RW on USB (and soon FireWire) are excellent uses of the technology (as opposed to CD-RW drives linked via a Centronics printer port... bleck!
Whether USB:The Next Generation or FireWire emerges as a viable standard (hey, why not both?), I just hope the specs aren't as screwy, or as, um, variegated (ultra, ultraWide, 1, 2, 3 .. round and round she goes, place your bets..).
-----
".sig,
While I have been patiently waiting for FireWire devices to out for quite some time, I have to wonder what advantage I gain in this age of Ultra2 SCSI. True, even high performing hard drives don't use all of the bandwidth available to them theoretically so sheer speed is not necessarily the issue. Clearly, being able to deliver some power down the Firewire chain is useful for laptops, but as we see with these drives, anything beyond one drive requires an AC adapter. Price considerations? FireWire is still expensive..does anyone know if this is inherent in its design? I wonder which can be more cheaply made. Hotswapping? Not really an issue for me at this time but definately ties into one of Firewire's only advantages: non-PC appliances. Sony is just about the only provider of Firewire enabled consumer electronics at the moment but Firewire videocameras and vcrs and dvd-recordables would be nice. Firewire zip drives would be nice...carry your drive to a friend and plug it in without having to reboot his machine. I'm curious what other advantages and disadvantages you perceive in the Firewire vs SCSI debate. BTW, I'm looking for a converter box to convert RCA-style composite or S-video into Firewire. I want my VCR to jack into a Firewire video capture card I have been eying. Please email me if you know of one.
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
There are some indications that FireWire is losing momentum in the PC industry. It should sto;; replace the RCA connectors in the consumer space (good riddance).
People are just tired of waiting. The USB standard was started years AFTER FireWire and has already become a mass-market product. FireWire is still stuck with commitees and interoperability problems.
The two last nails in FireWire's coffin (the first being Apple's ridiculous royalty claims) may be the USB upgrade to similar speeds (USB 2.0) and the upcoming ultrafast ATAPI standard based on serial signalling.
I'm not saying it's totally dead, it may be useful in things like disk farms for video editing and Apple will surely use it, but it won't replace SCSI and ATAPI any time soon and USB 2.0 may be a cheaper and more available connection for video capture, digital satellite receivers, etc.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Compare the Castlewood's Orb drive to VST's Firewire drive. The performance specs are close, but then the Orb takes the cake with removable media at about $30 per disk/cartidge whatever you call it. Not to mention more interfaces than you can shake a stick at. I would guess the SCSI versions probably would run under Linux too.
u ct/FW9520
/ orb_spec.htm -
-
++++VST 2GB Fireware Harddrive++++
http://www.vsttech.com/vst/techspecs.nsf/ByProd
This is taken from the address above.
-begin---------------------------------
System requirements:
Apple Macintosh G3 with FireWire or
Apple Macintosh G3 with Apple 1394 PCI Card
-end------------------------------------
++++Castlewood 2.2GB Orb Drive++++
http://www.castlewoodsystems.com/castlewood/web
This is taken from the address above.
-begin-----------------------------------------
ORB is available as both external and internal models, with the following interfaces:
External SCSI
External Parallel Port
Internal SCSI
Internal EIDE
External USB(Announced for demonstration at MacWorld 1999)
IEEE 1394 FireWire (Announced for demonstration at MacWorld 1999)
Operating Systems Compatibility
Windows 98, 95, 3.1, NT 4.0+, MS DOS 5.0+, OS/2 4.0, Mac OS7.1+
-end-------------------------------------------
Ryan
At least this is true for the parallel port models. I bet it's true
for the SCSI as well.
But it's a dog to set up. Hang in there, it will kick some butt once you have eveything working. Hang in there (-;
The hard drives are interesting for P1394 mindshare because they are obviously computer peripherals. Yes, they aren't amazing drives in themselves but they look pretty cool. The only other peripheral I can think of at the moment is a Sony audio/video A-D/D-A converter. In fact, Sony is pushing P1394 harder than Apple, with digital camcorders and the VAIO PCs.
Makes me wish I could have sourced a Sony Ultralight down here in Oz, rather than the Sharp Actius I've got. I spotted the FireWire, but I prefer local support...
Is there any way of getting a FireWire port into a notebook / ultralight - does anything run fast enough? - My choices are really limited to USB, PCMCIA & IRDA 1.something (stop laughing).
(How fast _does_ PCMCIA go?)
Kris.
Win a Rio (or join the SETI Club via same link)
When evaluating SCSI you really must consider it (at least in its present incarnations) to be a _performance-based_ standard. High-end SCSI is one hundred percent about maximum read/write speed at max high efficency. You don't honestly need to go with scsi unless you are working with applications that are extremely drive-intensive. Photoshop, Digital Video, Multitrack Digital Audio... Also for mission critical server data with RAID mirroring. SCSI is complicated because there are about a zillion different applications that it can be tailored for. The standards don't compete. They just go up in price and performance....
:) but I looove SCSI
All I gotta say is that Ultra2LVD is gonna kick firewire's ass for at least a year. I won't go firewire until it is performance proven.
I don't mean to sound preachy
-3jane
I don't really understand why you would want to buy this sort of thing. When you buy a firewire card, the idea is that you already have some sort of digital video cam or DV vcr laying around. The advantage there is that you can use the (expensive-ass) decoding hardware in the deck or camera - as well as transfer the data digitally. If you are starting with analogue video data, you would be much better off buying something like a Miro DC20 or some such encoder/decoder card. The usually have analog ins and outs for video and stereo audio (RCA) and provide the chipset to play back the hi-rez captured stream at (hopefully) a broadcast quality (30frames-60fields/sec). If you buy a firewire card without some firewire harware, you are no better off and out some bucks.... :)
BUT if this whole post is off topic and you DO have a DV cam, you have all the hardware you need right there! I am postive that the XL-1 (cannon) and the higher end prosumer Sony models have RCA ins for video and audio. You just digitize your signal there, then dump over the firewire and keep your workflow intact
Ciao!!
-3jane
Uh huh!
And of course with ide/scsi you can hot plug the drives, and pull the plug while it is writing a file, then plug it back in and have it automatically finish writing the file.
NOT!!!
Dont let the speed of this little drive fool you. How fast was SCSI and IDE in their first generation?
Firewire "A" is capable of handling 400mbs. That is 50 MegaBytes for all you people that cant do math.
Lucent has demoed prototypes of Firewire running at 1.2Gbs. Thats 150Mega BYTES per sec. Apple also has the specs for 2.4Gb Firewire with will be demoed in 2002.
Firewire is going to kick arse!
Also, check out the physical size of the drive. It fits in your coat pocket. The next generation will also be bootable.
Duh!
Dont knock technology when it is only young, cause when it grows up, it's gonna come back and knock your face into the ground!
No my friend, USB like all other non networked interfaces is measured in megabytes, so 12Mb transfer is megabytes not bits. If it were a network card it would be bits.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I have been waiting to see FireWire drives since I first heard of FireWire. I'm envisioning an all USB/FireWire system. No more IDE,SCSI,Serial,PS/2 etc. An internal USB port for small drives like LS-120, Zip, the Sony HDdisk, regular floppies and the normal two external USB ports for keyboards, scanners, mice etc. Then an internal FireWire port for hard drives (normal and RAID), DVD and CDs etc and then an external port for cameras external drives etc. It will be beautiful. Increased throughput and hotswapability (is that a word?) for all the drives. Hmmm...you could probably connect computers with their FireWire ports....400Mbps Beowulf cluster....Firewire can only have up to 67 (or is it 68?) devices, so a 67 node Beowulf cluster. COOL!
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
These are not meant to replace your SCSI drives. The yare just a quick little removeable media. Later when you see big time Firewire drives at 7200 and 10000rpm and are unhappy, complain then.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Upgradable? They are a brick with no power supply, 2 small connectors, and very simple electronics -- just buy a second one. Sure, they're a bit pricey now... they are first generation. Give em 6-12 months, and they'll come down.
If you want a chassis, buy a SCSI drive and an external case. If you want something small, light, and cheap, go FireWire.
Matt Slot / Bitwise Operator / Ambrosia Software, Inc.
Yes, FireWire supports hotswapping... but be careful about unplugging a drive then plugging it in elsewhere. The hardware and drivers handle this fine, but the OS itself may not like a volume whose file system is in a bad state.
:)
Hotswapping is nice for reorganizing peripherals, and may work for read-only storage devices, but you still have to be careful.
Matt Slot / Bitwise Operator / Ambrosia Software, Inc.
What a moron...
Because this drive is a slow performer I guess that means FireWire is slow. How about Seagate Quantum and IBM getting off their fat asses and making a FireWire native drive. FYI, the mechanism in these externals are portable size IDE drives. Speaking of a sucky technology...
The truth will set you free.
This is the coolest thing about firewire, even cooler than its size and not needing a power supply:
You can unplug it during file transfer. Plug it back in and it completes the file transfer. Coolest shit in the world. It even works if you're playing a movie on the firewire drive. You're watching a Star Wars trailer off the VST drive and then -oops- your friend trips over the cable and unplugs it. Plug it back in and the movie picks up where it left off.
I think that is more an issue of the mechanism used, which is still an important consideration.
Uhmm... for 100MB ZIP medias, $18 x 20 disks = $360... compare that with $299 for 2 GIG firewire. Even with 250MB ZIP and 2 GIG JAZ, still beats them in term of transfer rate and seek time no?
So how does this relate to the topic? Well, I'm glad to finally be seeing some stuff for firewire. I was worried there for a while.
-----BEGIN ANNOYING SIG BLOCK-----
Evan
rooooar
Substain is only 13mbs..
"Windows 98 Second Edition works and players better than ever." -Microsoft's Home page on Win98SE.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
A closer look at the specs for these drives show them with a max transfer rate of 5.5 mb/sec. That's not much faster than say a SCSI I narrow hard drive!
They're slow as hell.
Slow? Compared to a Zip or a Jaz drive they're pretty quick. These are not drives designed to be your main HD, they are portable HDs.
The damn things have an average sustained transfer rate of 8MB/sec. [snip] Don't the USB HDs on the market now, go faster?
USB has a max rate of 12 Mb(its)ps, that's 1.5 MB(ytes)ps. So no, a USB device with an ABSOLUTE maximum of 1.5 MBps transfer rate is more than 3 times slower than a VST FireWire drive with a 5.5 MBps transfer rate.
My IDE drives go faster than that! I really hope nobody gets suckered into buying these things.
Are your IDE drives packaged to fit in your pocket? Are they hot swappable? Do they get power from the IDE chain? Do you even HAVE an external IDE port?
These drives should be compared to Jaz disks and other removable media, not fixed HDs.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
I haven't been keeping in touch with the PC-world Firewire effort lately. What would be the necessary components (hardware & software) to use this puppy on a PC running Win98 or Win2K? I haven't seen any PC interface cards besides the video editing stuff and TI's developer kits.
Is Win98 Firewire support limited to Device Bay?
FirePower has also some FireWire drives. Faster and bigger.
s .html
http://www.firepower.com/products/FireDrivespec
>- Visigothe said: "...UltraWide SCSI 3 you can't have a total length greater than 2 feet [they say 3 but even with the best shielded cables, I've found I have problems over 2 feet]..." isn't the cable length 3 METERS, not feet? Cause a lot of cabling comes in 3 feet length in enterprise-level servers... At Paralan.com I found an extender cable to give SCSI a length of 2.5 MILES! I do not know how well it works (they say 40MB/Sec throughput), and it is pricey (fiber optic cabling), and I am not exactly sure why one should use it, but it is pretty nifty... you can spread your computer all over town! -G.
Check out http://www.MacKiDo.com/Hardware/USB20.html for some good background
I agree with you that the transfer rate/seek time is much better than the Zip drive, but the cost of the disks has really come down in the last year or so. If you wanted a quantity of 20 it should be less than USD 10 for each one.
I'd rather have this drive than a Zip drive, if I had Firewire on all my computers.
Jack
Are they upgradeable? I doubt it.
Wouldn't it make more sense for them to
sell a Firewire-based portable chassis, into which you could install disks of any capacity?
The ambitions are: wake up, breathe, keep breathing.
The drives look cool. They're small. They're ugly, yet streamlined. They're slow as hell. The damn things have an average sustained transfer rate of 8MB/sec. My IDE drives go faster than that! I really hope nobody gets suckered into buying these things. Don't the USB HDs on the market now, go faster?
A truly great man never puts away the simplicity of a child.
Nodding my head in agreement - think about how much easier it would be if all interfaces had easy pass-through allowing simultanous connection of similarly wired devices ...
...
SCSI has it, but only to a degree and with quite a few problems with termination, incompatibilities between devices, devices with hard-wired SCSI IDs
A set-up with all USB (for small things) and FireWire (for the big guns) and maybe some sort of SuperDuper thing for those things to come which would exhaust firewire but which would share the pass-through trasnparency would be perfect.
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
For removable, portable storage, the Castlewood ORB drive (http://www.castlewood.com) will be a much better choice when the FireWire version is released. (right now only SCSI, EIDE, and parallel are available). It has many advantages:
SPEED: The ORB has a sustained transfer of 12.2 MB/sec and burst of 20
PRICE: $200 for the drive (though the FireWire could be a little more pricey) and an estimated $30 per 2.2 GB cartridge.
EXPANDABILITY: I don't want to have to buy a whole new drive when I run out of space
PORTABILITY: how nice it would be if this drive became as standard as Zip, only little cartridges to carry around and pop in wherever.
I hope this drive catches on and puts Iomega out of business.
These drives are much slower than they could be over FireWire. Methinks they were designed with portability in mind, not speed. There are much faster FireWire drives available (there are links in pervious messages).
Relatively long time reader, first time writer btw...
-Rafi
-Rafi Remove the Spanish to email me.
Hmmm. Let's try this again. NO USB does NOT do 12Mb's a sec. And most serial interfaces I can think of is mesaured in bits a sec (ever heard if the serial port modems are connected to?). And USB and FireWire are both serial interfaces like EtherNet is.
Not that it matters how you measure it as long you use the right numbers. But the 12 number is in BIT's a sec. Try looking at this pice I found at Apple's site (not being able to find a spec on usb.org. You can say alot about Apple. But they don't lie about these things) :
Performance Comparison.
USB offers data transfer rates of up to 12 megabits per second, more than 1200 times faster than the 10 kilobits per second provided by Apple Desktop Bus ports (shown here as 1 pixel, though the speed actually scales to less than 1/3 pixel) and more than 50 times faster than the 230 kilobits per second of traditional Apple serial ports.
Try getting the facts right before you rant at somebody!