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[ClassicHasClass]

Got a couple more FireWire hubs since I've junked the FW card in the G4 fileserver. The hub smoothes out a lot of problems with having multiple mass storage FW devices connected.

[ClassicHasClass]

Also, I, uh, invested about $4 and got this.

http://www.floodgap.com/iv/3250

Bustin' makes me feel go-o-od.

[Raion-Fox]

Got a couple more FireWire hubs since I've junked the FW card in the G4 fileserver. The hub smoothes out a lot of problems with having multiple mass storage FW devices connected.

Firewire really is better than USB. Wonder why Apple gave up on it, and Thunderbolt too effectively.

[guardian452]

Got a couple more FireWire hubs since I've junked the FW card in the G4 fileserver. The hub smoothes out a lot of problems with having multiple mass storage FW devices connected.

Firewire really is better than USB. Wonder why Apple gave up on it, and Thunderbolt too effectively.

Apple was late to the TB3 party but the new macbook pro supports it... How did they give up on thunderbolt, again?

Far as I know the only macbook without thunderbolt is the tiny 12"... maybe coming in a future update? and the air is stuck on TB2, probably till it's discontinued.

Firewire was superior to other technology at the time (better than USB when it was stuck at 11mbps) but it was expensive both in terms of hardware, and energy. It was great for video cameras and ipods with PCs that had late-90's CPU power, but USB2 came out and sort of obsoleted it. It was amazing compared to a serial port. FW800 never really took off, tho I used it on an external disk for many years to my macpro1,1 without issue. It didn't make sense for such rare use cases when they could sell a thunderbolt-firewire adapter.

You have to remember back in those days we had digital cameras with built-in floppy drives (sony mavica), that's what we used at my high school. Firewire was too expensive, and we were so amazed with the digital camera it didn't matter!

[ClassicHasClass]

USB2 came out and sort of obsoleted it.

Sort of, yes. On paper the 480Mbit speed of USB 2.0 should have blown FW400 away but most mass-storage devices still had better throughput with FW400, sometimes beating USB 2.0 on the same device by as much as 25%. In fairness Apple tended to favour FW at the time over USB for that application, though there was still a delta on Windows.

That said, all I use FW for these days is ... cameras and mass storage. Which is what I was using it for back then too. (Well, sometimes a disc burner.)

[jan-jaap]

USB2 came out and sort of obsoleted it.

Sort of, yes. On paper the 480Mbit speed of USB 2.0 should have blown FW400 away but most mass-storage devices still had better throughput with FW400

The 480Mbit number for USB2 is raw wire transfer rate, after you deduct 8b/10b encoding you're left with 400Mbit. The 400Mbit number of FW400 is *after* 8b/10b encoding, so effective transfer rates are the same.

IEEE1394 uses SBP2 (SCSI over FireWire) which is much more efficient than whatever USB2 mass storage uses. That's why external disks work better (faster, less CPU load) with FW than USB2.

Recently, USB 3.1 I believe started offering SCSI over USB.

[Shiunbird]

FireWire also had direct access to memory, sparing precious CPU cycles when doing lots of operations over the bus.
I have tons of FireWire devices, and so far I haven't had the need to upgrade.

[Dodoid]

FireWire also had direct access to memory, sparing precious CPU cycles when doing lots of operations over the bus.
I have tons of FireWire devices, and so far I haven't had the need to upgrade.

DMA from an external device? Sounds like a bit of a security risk, unless I'm misunderstanding something.

[Raion-Fox]

DMA from an external device? Sounds like a bit of a security risk, unless I'm misunderstanding something.

Unless your device has rewritable firmware, I don't see it. On my backup disks I use noexec bits for mounting anyways

[Dodoid]

I suppose I'm used to USB devices where they're a dime a dozen from China, free viruses included. I suppose FireWire was never that cheap/available to sketchy companies.

[guardian452]

USB2 came out and sort of obsoleted it.

Sort of, yes. On paper the 480Mbit speed of USB 2.0 should have blown FW400 away but most mass-storage devices still had better throughput with FW400, sometimes beating USB 2.0 on the same device by as much as 25%. In fairness Apple tended to favour FW at the time over USB for that application, though there was still a delta on Windows.

That said, all I use FW for these days is ... cameras and mass storage. Which is what I was using it for back then too. (Well, sometimes a disc burner.)

480 vs. 400 isn't enough to get out of bed over. FW had DMA... and if the device was expensive enough to include it in the first place it was a world apart from a cheap USB jobbie.

The 480Mbit number for USB2 is raw wire transfer rate, after you deduct 8b/10b encoding you're left with 400Mbit. The 400Mbit number of FW400 is *after* 8b/10b encoding, so effective transfer rates are the same.

IEEE1394 uses SBP2 (SCSI over FireWire) which is much more efficient than whatever USB2 mass storage uses. That's why external disks work better (faster, less CPU load) with FW than USB2.

That too... but like I said above 480 vs. 400 isn't worth getting excited about. Going from 11 to 400 (usb-FW) or 400 to 10g (FW-TB) or 10g to 40g (TB to TB3)... that's more interesting.

[Raion-Fox]

USB's problem to me is multi-fold:

You can't directly connect peers together. PC-PC? You can't. At least, in 2.0 and below.

Uses CPU time like IDE and SATA and unlike SCSI

No daisy chaining support in the protocol itself

Inconsistent speeds

I'd gladly revive FW and make it competitive to USB 3.x and Thunderbolt

And G452, it seems Apple's recently going USB-C.

[Dodoid]

And G452, it seems Apple's recently going USB-C.

TB3 uses a USB-C port, but carries a PCIe, DisplayPort connection as well as the usual USB and power.

[Raion-Fox]

TB3 uses a USB-C port, but carries a PCIe, DisplayPort connection as well as the usual USB and power.

Huh, I didn't actually know that.

[guardian452]

How else are you supposed to plug in that gaming GPU to your laptop and charge it with only one cable? viewtopic.php?f=6&t=16731617#p7398178

TB3 uses a USB-C port, but carries a PCIe, DisplayPort connection as well as the usual USB and power.

USB-PD is new. Before C, the host *always* powered the peripheral. The downside is this means your little charging brick is now "smart" enough to crash and require a power cycle occasionally.