Firewire 4: What's it good for?

Nobody used FW 1600, so why would they care about 3200?

umm. no one HAS firewire 1600 yet. Both 1600 and 3200 were just announced last year.

I don't care what adapter you use, when you connect to a FW 400 port, the resulting speed will still be FW 400 speed! The ONLY advantage of an adapter is to CONNECT FW 800 device to a FW 400 port. Some machines do not have a FW 800 port, hence the need for an adapter to ALLOW the connection of a FW 800 device. Other than that, there is no sane reason to use an adapter if you have a functioning FW 800 port.

As to your comment about 10 MP cameras now being usable because of FW 3200, it is incredibly ignorant. Get clue!

Well, I use SanDisk Extreme IV CF cards, and an Extreme IV reader, so I don't need to go grab a cup of coffee to download images from my 10 MP camera. Yes 1600, or 3200 would be faster, but 800 is not exactly crawling, if you have the right cards and readers.

FW 3200 would make perfect replacement for eSATA. eSATA is limited to one device per port and can't be daisy chained. Firewire supports 63 devices on the chain. Plus there is a 2 meter cable length limit where as FW has a 72 meter limit (this may be different for S3200, 100m if you use optical connections).

There is if you have a FireWire 400 device. I have an external hard drive that has interfaces for FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 so if Apple replaces FireWire 400 with FireWire 800 then I will need to get an adapter.

That's your choice. I had an external HD enclosure w/FW400 & USB 2, but when I got a machine with a FW 800 port, I bought a new external case with FW 800 & USB 2. I'd rather have the extra speed than use an adapter, YMMV.

In other words, you read his first comment incorrectly but moved passed it instead of professionally admitting you had it back asswards?

Classic.

Apparently, but, i've since went back and read the link, and yes, I got it wrong. Does that make you feel better now?

I was reading the post at the start of this thread and was reminded of Firewire other lives. In part that was due to mention of the 10 MP camera.

See the old Firewire is common in the machine vision industry as a popular lower speed connector. A much faster Firewire might extend it's use into the range of high performance cameras. FireWire has also been used in the automation sector which of course is allied with machine vision. To go a bit farther out Firewire is used extensive in one of the jet fighter programs. Forgot which one so you will have to look that up.

In any event I'm still not sure if Firewire is fast enough. The question that comes to mind is how fast is an HDTV camcorder running 1080P or maybe I should say what is the data rate.

What I'm trying to get at here is that there are more applications for Firewire than meets the eye. As always a faster data rate is welcome (in most cases). So I see the traditional uses staying with us. Especially considering Firewires positive history there. The thing to be aware of is the non traditional uses that where highlighted above. If Firewire keeps it's reliability and speed I can see even more adoption. That of course is talking about a wider range of industries, in the PC world it is up to Apple.

Now that is a big concern as Apple hasn't seemed to take a lot of interest in Firewire lately. That could be simply a matter of waiting for the slow standards process and for silicon to catch up. Frankly Firewire is on example of Apple at it's best developing innovative hardware, I do hope that support and adoption is on going. The remaining question is how soon can TI get the hardware out the door.

Dave

Not confusing at all just weed out the chafe and look at the products and their weaknesses. So:

ESATA should be thought of as no more than an extended disk interface. It does not have anywhere near the flexibility of either Firewire nor USB.

USB has always been an interesting offering but frankly is oriented to slower hardware. The 480 version tried to deal with that. One big problem with USB is it's poor implementation on Macs.

Firewire on the other hand came out of the gate faster and with a better design. Fast is good of course but so is adoption, Firewire simply has had issues with adoption on the PC side. Unfortunately this hits Firewire hard due to differences in volume.

If you look closely you will find that the only two things Firewire and USB have in common is that they communicate serially and that Apple uses both interfaces. Electrically and software wise they are two different beasts. They do compete with each other but there is enough variance between the two that both should survive for a while.

Dave

Can we all just dispense with the Theoretical Numbers? They don't match up with their actual results.

I wouldn't say that one was a better design than the other. USB was great for what it was intended for, and about every non-wireless keyboard and mouse are USB and will continue to be. It has been extended (USB 2.0) to be competitive with FireWire 400 but other than speed does not have flexibility of FireWire, it was very strong and capable component link (audio and video) when it first came out and as far as I know USB 2 still cannot compete with it. I can hook up a 450mhz G4 to my 46" TV via FireWire and record directly to disk with with minimal set-up or play from the computer to the TV over 1 cable. As far as I know you cannot do that with USB because it does not have the two way communication and control that FW does in the standard.

Apple could have pushed FireWire more than they did and not charged licensing fees to use the name, which is why Sony has FireWire by another name, but even it it was the household standard you would not see keyboards and mice using FW and probably most consumer printers would still be USB as well.

The problem with FW 800 as I see it is there really is not a pressing need in the consumer market for the extra speed, especially at the extra expense.

The problem with Firewire is that probably fewer than 5% of computer users will ever touch a FW device, while 100% use USB. And once the last computers with IDE die off over the next few years, 100% will use SATA.

That's a good question. Just about everything these days is USB 2. Even Apple dropped FW from the iPod! Never understood that one. I can see less manufacturing costs, but at the same time Apple abandoned it's own technology and promoted further adoption of USB 2 thereby decreasing demand for FW.

Wanna bet? The future of Computing will change massively when basic Motherboard design makes it's next evolutionary step.

This group lists all sorts of Industry heavyweights that make USB a no go.

http://www.1394ta.org/index.html

Yes, they decreased demand for FW but they sure increased demand with full commonality for the iPod. As much as I see the advantages of FW, I don't think they outweigh having a common connector for a device such as the iPod.

Oh, come on. That's just laughable. Sure, all of those companies make Firewire devices. USB a no go? That's a fantasy from 12 years ago.

Not true. From day one, the iPod came with both USB and FW. At some point Apple dropped FW from it.

Show me the military applications of USB or the autoindustry applications of USB that work in conjunction with guidance systems, control systems and more.

I would love to see these systems that replaced Firewire.

And that has what to do with my point? Firewire is a very niche technology compared to USB, and that is not going to change.

I don't believe that's correct. The original iPod of October 2001 was FW-only and Mac-only. The second generation (July 2002) was FW-only but added Windows support. The third generation (April 2003) added USB but that was a Windows-only model. I'm almost certain that USB support for Mac-paired iPods didn't commence until 2004.

Not true.
Day one: from Oct. 2001 to Apr. 2003 the original iPod had only FW.
Day two: from Apr. 2003 to Sept 2006 iPod and iPod mini had FW and USB
January 2005 iPod shuffle (USB only)
September 2006 iPod nano and iPod 5G USB only

FW is not a "niche" technology, it's not just aimed at doing everything like USB is.
USB is a do-it-all solution, cheap enough for consumers, with middle of the road performance.
FW is very good at big data transfers, think storage, HDDs, audio and video. Can be daisy-chained, has more power, lower latency, etc. Can be a little more expensive than USB, but if you need speed and reliability, it's a better choice.
Then eSATA is even faster but only for HDDs.
Then there's SAS, Fiber, etc...

USB has its strengths and benefits, so does FW (and eSATA, etc.). It's up to the BUYER to know what fits his needs the best. It's good to have that kind of choice.

In one sense, it reminds me of the "war" between PC (USB) and Mac (FW), while PC (USB) is less expensive and has more applications, Mac (FW) is more expensive, but is best at what it's aimed for, more reliable.

FWIW, I'll choose FW over USB anytime for HDDs, external ODDs, audio and video interfaces.

I'm eager to see what manufacturers will do with FW3200.

Another use for Firewire that I came across, in an engineering rag, is as an interface to Software Defined Radio hardware. There in was described a ham radio that interfaced the analog world to a PC used as the signal processor

Just another item to add to the list of uses for Firewire. The point Firewire has proven to be very successful doing things that other interfaces seem to have trouble with. It is not perfect, for example in it's current form it is considered to be a low speed interface in the world of machine vision.


Dave

Exactly.

OK. Perhaps it was my second iPod that came with both. Nonetheless, point being that Apple shipped iPods with both USB and FW. They were shipped with two cables, one USB and one FW. You connected each to the same connector on the iPod.

I think a point just about anyone might make is that FireWire doesn't really do anything for an iPod that USB can't. Considering that USB is ubiquitous in the Windows world while FireWire isn't, that points to the iPod being a USB device.

Hardly surprising. USB is an Intel standard, and Intel controls PC design.

Firewire is what HDMI should have been.

xxxxx

Now you're just going to confuse people.

That's obvious. Except the bit about FW not really doing anything that USB can't. FW is way faster.

The comment was in regard to a single universal connector for iPods. I've never seen any data that says FW (when iPods had that) was faster for iPod transfers than USB. Is there data that says it was faster?

Do a search for Firewire vs USB2 and you will get plenty of data.

Here's one: http://www.cwol.com/firewire/firewire-vs-usb.htm

Yes, we all understand the real world speed difference between FW and USB on high performance drives but the question was in regard to iPods (anything but a high performance drive). Syncing with iTunes is not exactly the same thing as a high volume data copy. Given all that, if there's still a speed difference between FW and USB on syncing an iPod, it can't be of enough consequence for Apple to maintain two different interfaces.