Where the hell are the True Firewire Hard Drives?
When Stevo announced forewire (millions of years ago) he trumpeted its speed and potential and harped on about firewire Hds becoming common place. In fact my G4 agp has an internal firewire port. However, all I've ever seen is IDE drives with FW bridges. Where the hell did this 400Mbs Firewire Hd revolution go?
Comments
I wish for internal FW drives as well, my computer could use them, would be nice, esp if they were bus powered, kinda like ADC for a HDD.
<a href="http://forums.appleinsider.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=2&t=000958" target="_blank">Real FIREWIRE Drive exists from Panasonic/Germany</a>
Todays/Yesterdays Firewire does 400Mb/s or 50MB/s.
ATA66 has a theoretical max of 66 MB/s.
ATA100 has a theoretical max of 100 MB/s.
ATA133 has a theoretical max of 133 MB/s.
Typical IDE/ATA disks push out data at around 40 MB/s sustained. With some peaks but overall 40MB/s is about all they do.
Why would anyone ever make a native FW drive when the simple fact is ATA (at the moment) is a faster technology AND the HD itself can't feed data much faster than 40MB/s anyway? The only real reason for ATA100 and ATA133 was to get bigger drive support (> 120GB I think).
I wish I knew more about drive technology so I could better understand 'why' the drives can't seem to spit out more data per second than they are now. It sure seems like they hit a wall and then just moved from speed to size.
Now that I think about it... where FW2 could really shine is in a striped raid.
1600Mb/s is 200MB per second (3200Mb/s is 400MB) and no matter how you look at it that's a lot of bandwidth! 6 or 7 80GB IDE drives on the chain could (if I'm looking at this right) would push (7*40MB) 280MB/s worth of data! I know those numbers can't be totally right since math with this stuff is never so cut-n-dry but you get the basic idea and I'd bet 200MB/s could be doable without too much trouble.
Dave
[ 06-03-2002: Message edited by: DaveGee ]</p>
<strong>What data rate is uncompressed HDTV? Can Firewire 2 handle it?</strong><hr></blockquote>
Broadcast HDTV is roughly 24-35mbps so even today FW could handle it. FW2 will be icing on the cake.
<strong>Check the Current hardware Forum.
<a href="http://forums.appleinsider.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=2&t=000958" target="_blank">Real FIREWIRE Drive exists from Panasonic/Germany</a></strong><hr></blockquote>
Yes, I saw that, but can you buy just the drive without the unit, and if so, where and how much?
:cool:
- Your local hardware geek.