[X4U] See / Don't see

[Philip Robar]

On Mar 24, 2005, at 9:41 AM, John Richardson wrote:

> Does anyone know the exact technical reason for firewire
> problems that have been happening for the last year or two?

Specifications are written by committees and are full of compromises. 
Specifications are never completely unambiguous. Specifications are 
implemented by companies composed of imperfect human beings. Each 
company has it's own knowledge/understanding of the specification, 
quality of developers, and quality standards.


> I won't go near a firewire drive with a 10 foot pole.

Then you are cheating yourself out of the use of a very powerful and 
convenient, but not perfect, technology that by and large just works 
for the vast majority of people.

I'd also suggest that you not look too closely into how USB works. It 
makes firewire look like an oasis of sanity and reliability. If you 
really want to scare yourself read the USB chapter of "PC Hardware in a 
Nutshell".

By the way, in case you hadn't noticed. It doesn't make any sense to 
say "I won't go near a firewire drive with a 10 foot pole." and then in 
the same and next paragraph say that you use firewire drives.


> By the way, the drive in the firewire case is an IDE drive so it only 
> cranks out data at IDE
> speeds. So, what is the purpose of a consumer firewire hard drive? 
> Note that
> I said hard drive, not inquired about the purpose of firewire ports 
> for
> video, audio and possibly professional SAN / RAID / WHATEVER disk 
> solutions.

I'm not aware of any native firewire devices, they all use some type of 
native interface to firewire bridge. Most "firewire" products are 
indeed actually IDE devices.

Professional SAN / RAID / WHATEVER disk solutions are based on hard 
drives so I don't see the distinction you're trying to make.

As to consumer firewire hard drives, firewire and USB are the 
mainstream options for external storage. Firewire is noticeably faster 
than USB2 so it is the external storage of choice if performance is a 
concern and you are a mainstream user. Firewire is the choice for 
mainstream Mac users because USB2 has only recently been built-in to 
Macs by Apple, whereas modern Macs have always had firewire. On PC's, 
where firewire is still rare and USB2 is common, I'm willing to bet 
that USB2 is the majority choice of mainstream users

External storage allows you to have more storage then you can fit 
internally in a given case.  Since firewire and USB are hot plug-able 
they allow you to conveniently take your data with you if you need to. 
Hot plug-ability also allows for convenient off site storage of 
backups. You do store your backups offsite don't you?

> I also do backups in general and even more voraciously on my legacy 
> Firewire
> drives.

Although they may be legacy in your set up, firewire is still very much 
the mainstream and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.


Phil