Move over USB: Here's FireWire

[paulw]

FYI

While Apple Computer was happy to take home an Emmy for its FireWire technology, the company must be even more pleased that the high-speed connection is moving closer to a bigger goal--becoming standard on the majority of PCs.

The rest is on the link below

http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2807924,00.html?chkpt=zdnnh082701ts

[Brian Ellis]

I think the two are complementary, neither will kick the other out. I use USB (1.1) currently for such things as mice, still camera transfer and other things where IEEE-1394 would be a decided overkill and it would become decidedly expensive to have multiple IEEE-1394 ports to handle external disk drives, CD-RW, back-up systems, scanners and so on. It may be (I don't know) that multiple IEEE-1394 ports would create conflicts (anyone know?).

USB 2.0 equipment is coming on the market now and much is backward-compatible in both directions (i.e., your current 1.1 external stuff will work on 2.0 ports and some 2.0 stuff will work at reduced speeds in a 1.1 port).

I don't feel we'll be losing that 4 pin flat socket for many a year, yet, any more than we have lost the 9 pin D-type serial port.

[Snake-Eyes]

Originally posted by Brian Ellis
I think the two are complementary, neither will kick the other out. I use USB (1.1) currently for such things as mice, still camera transfer and other things where IEEE-1394 would be a decided overkill and it would become decidedly expensive to have multiple IEEE-1394 ports to handle external disk drives, CD-RW, back-up systems, scanners and so on. It may be (I don't know) that multiple IEEE-1394 ports would create conflicts (anyone know?).

Not expensive at all. Some firewire hardware comes with a card, and obviously firewire DV kits come with a card. The equipment itself is not all that cheap, but at the same time it isn't really more expensive than other equipment of the same type and quality. For example, I bought a Microtek v5700 scanner (mainly for the high non-interpolated scanning resolution, so that I can scan not only photos, but my original negatives), which is a firewire/usb device, for around $300. This included a firewire card with 2 external ports and 1 internal port. This was not long after I bought my Pinnacle StudioDV kit, which also (surprise, surprise) includes a similar card. That cost me around $100.

I have both installed in my system right now (cards and scanner), along with a firewire external CDRW drive. So now I can have up to four external firewire devices and two internal devices (though I haven't yet seen any of the latter) installed. I simply plug in my digital camcorder when I want to edit things, and leave the others installed all the time. I haven't had any conflicts whatsoever with the firewire, and everything is truly plug and play (so far, knock on wood). I can't say the same for the USB ports. I've had devices that I had to install drivers up front for, then reboot, with USB.

I figure you'd be able to get a single 3 port firewire card, with nothing but drivers (if that, some are supported natively in the MS OS's) for probably under $50. This isn't all that much more expensive than the USB 1.1 add-on cards used to run (before the advent of 2.0, heh). And it's MUCH faster.

I do agree with you that USB2.0 and firewire should be able to coexist though. Just like the parallel and serial connectors. Each would support some devices, and having both would allow a wider range of hardware options on a single PC. Sadly, I really doubt that's gonna be common- most PCs are coming without firewire, and even then the USB is still normally only 1.1. Getting either USB2.0 or firewire right now is normally a matter of buying the card and filling a slot..