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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.
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.
http://www.adaptec.com/products/index.html#1394
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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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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?
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!