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Firewire Harddrives 113

Posted by Hemos from the no-power-and-400-Mbps-transfer dept.
schmack writes "VST Technologies have recently released FireWire Harddrives. They look fantastic in stunning red and yellow with that swell FireWire image on them. They perform pretty good too -- 400Mbps transfer rate, you don't need a power supply if you're not connecting more than one [FireWire will provide enough juice] and they come in 2, 4 and 6 GIG configurations.
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Firewire Harddrives

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  • esp. with USB 2.0 coming soon with a much faster transfer rate than current 12mbps USB 1.0

    Umm, USB 2.0 isn't coming soon..and even when it does it'll still be lacking several of the options firewire brings _today_. By the time USB 2.0 is released, firewire will be chuggin along at 800+Mbps

    Face it, Firewire should be the standard.

  • Remember, these are first generation (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    As production ramps up, and other companies join the fray, the pricing on these drives and other FireWire hard drives will surely drop to at least SCSI level. It's true, no one should write FireWire off because of the performance of these devices. Just wait until a company comes along that targets the high-end of the market, rather than the sneaker-net storage of these devices.

  • other Firewire drives (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 06, 1999 @08:46AM (#1902023)
    These drives here [firepower.com] look like much better performers. The drives max theoretical transfer rate may not be 80MB/sec, but the sustained read/writes are good for a non-array mid-level drive. Too bad they have highend prices.

    Even if you have that Cheetah drive stuck to that 80MB/sec U2W card, it will still only produce in the neighborhood of about 15-18MB/sec sustained, probably less. Keep that in mind before you blow off this 50MB/sec Firewire.

  • Firewire for hard drives - It's a good idea... (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 06, 1999 @09:26AM (#1902024)
    Exactly what was said above, most of you have missed the point. It's portable, no external power required (= CONVIENENT!!!), and cute (which is in-line with Mac market demands). A bit on the pricey side, but so are most Mac toys. They'll sell some of these and make money.

    What would be even better (and I'm sure will come soon if not already) are drives for use on PC's, to operate under *nix and Windoze. Of course, I'm not sure what the "perfect" interface is, as USB (esp. with USB 2.0 coming soon with a much faster transfer rate than current 12mbps USB 1.0) is as convienent as FireWire and currently more widely accepted and marketed.

    The key here is that we need a convienent, universally accepted/compatible, good performer for the price, external accessory interface and prehiphals to use on this interface to solve all of the mirad demands of computer users as we become more mobile (esp. with the coming wireless broadband revolution to take place over the next few years). At some point this interface also has to address internal system requirements too (i.e. we ought to be able to get internal components to run on this same bus/interface).

    At some point networking and these interface models will merge so that you will have essentially a single connection model/protocol to harness the capabilities of storage devices, input devices (i.e. keyboard, mouse, scanner, pen), output devices (i.e. monitor, LCD, printer) communication devices (i.e. network, fax) and even processor devices (i.e. CPU, memory) so that more "black box" devices can be sold, sealed-case, and all integrated together simply by plugging them all into a common interface (be it wired and/or wireless). This is inline with the "smart appliance" model where our toasters, video phones, and other consumer electronics will also talk on this common medium and allow everything to share everything (i.e. you plug an additional CPU device into your 'net and suddenly most of your apps will run faster and Joey can now play that new game on the home theater which required more horsepower than you had yesterday).

    Utopia. It's gonna come to be, and when it does the days of computers and geeks will have passed on to the days of mass market consumer electronics and the "next big thing" will be on the agenda (i.e. cloning, space travel, etc.).

    If you've read this dribble this far, I'd be surprised.

  • Firewire vs... (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 06, 1999 @12:24PM (#1902025)
    IDE is 2 devices per chain. No competition at all.
    IDE drives are cheaper 'cause there's no smarts on the drive itself. It uses precious CPU time to do I/O. Thanks, but no thanks.
    IDE doesn't hotswap. Firewire does.
    Forget IDE. Let's go to SCSI.
    SCSI needs unique IDs for every device on the chain. Firewire negotiates.
    SCSI doesn't hotswap. Firewire does.
    SCSI is limited to 7 (15) devices in each chain. Firewire is limited(!) to 63. I'm at 7 SCSI now.
    SCSI cable lengths are voodoo, and must be shorter the faster you go (increased crosstalk on parallel data lines).
    SCSI cables are much more fragile than Firewire.
    SCSI cable connector - there're 3 or 4 different ones, aren't there? Firewire has two.
    Yes, Firewire is a subset of SCSI - but not the hardware. It's a subset of the SCSI protocol. It says nothing (IIRC) regarding the hardware (I could be wrong on this one).
    SCSI requires a computer in the chain.
    SCSI termination... ugh. "Let's see... is my internal drive terminated?" "Do I terminate this one, or maybe that one?" Give me a break. Firewire doesn't hassle you with ANY of that. Plug the d*** thing in.
    SCSI has big honkin' connectors. Firewire is little bitty. Think Palm.

    USB is slow, slow slow.
    USB is limited(!) to 127. Firewire loses here.
    USB requires a computer in the chain. Firewire doesn't. Firewire is peer-to-peer. I thought we settled this conceptual hash a while back (with p-t-p being better).
    Not sure about USB cable lengths.
    USB 2.0 is vapor... I don't want to hear, "Wait 'til next year..." That's loser talk.

  • Design (Score:1)

    by Octal ( 310 )
    I personally like the fact that they designed the drives well, rather than slapping a random blob-like translucent blue case on it, like most companies would have done. Although I personally wouldn't buy one, because I never buy first-generation technology, and because those things are ~$300 for the drive, plus ~$100 for me to get the IEEE 1394 card. It's not worth it, although I wouldn't mind trying some o' that SCSI voodoo.
  • Posted by MC BoB:

    Sony makes one, Sony DVMC-DA1 firewire / analog video converter.
    You can see it on the Sony site or use this link:
    http://www.angelfire.com/tx2/dv/dvmc.html

    I really hated to see the article on the Firewire HD's. There goes yet another reason not to buy the ReplayTV box, Damn, I guess now I'll tell myself I'm waiting for an Ethernet Port and HDTV compatability.

    MC BoB
  • keep your internal drives on another scsi bus or on IDE. when you want to change your external devices, simply unload the scsi modules, and
    reload them as nescesary. modularity is a good thing. (yes this does imply linux. would not be
    surprised if some other OSs could also do it)

    ive been doing this for years with my scsi zip drive.
  • but both the parallel and USB versions can be hot-swapped with ease.

  • http://www.adaptec.com/products/index.html#1394
  • As far as the 2.5 miles goes if it's fiber optic, then it's not real scsi cables. Your going to have to have some sort of conversion device from electro-magnetic to light then back again.

  • The fastest sustained transfer rate on the best of drives is about 10MB/sec sustained read, and about half of that for write.
  • How about a RAID box built out of IBM's microdrives? Plugs right in, the size of a sandwich, holds more than a gig, can draw power right off the wire... woo hoo!
  • When looking at the specs, you see they spin at 4200 rpm only, and have 12 ms access time. Compare that with decent U2W SCSI drives at 7200 and 1000 rpm with access times of 8 ms and less.

    This makes me think they just glued some cheap IDE drives to the FireWire port.

    But I have to admit it's nice for transport.
  • FireWire is still expensive..does anyone know if this is inherent in its design?

    ISTR a bit of fuss made a few months ago when Apple announced a new licensing scheme for Firewire.
    Those companies that got in on the ground floor a few years ago had to pay $7500 (total) for the tachnology.
    Those who only started licensing it recently are having to pay $1 per port and aren't too happy about it.
    $1 doesn't sound like much but when you consider that that cost of manufacturing a Firewire port is around 20c (?), the cost of some of the devices that could be made with it (though most of the cheap ones will use USB instead), and the number of these things that some companies could be using it's significant.


  • SCSI needs unique IDs for every device on the chain. Firewire negotiates.

    Ever heard of SCAM?

    I've got 3 uw IBM's and according to the jumpers they're all on 0. But with SCAM you can set the ID for each drive in the bios... cool..

  • Has it been mentioned that SCSI "dumbs down" to the slowest device on the chain?

    total arse-wash.

    if you have a fast and a fast-20 (ultra) device on a bus with a fast-20 capable controller, then data transfer will be at fast for the fast device, and fast-20 for the fast-20 device.

    The only problem is with LVD (ultra-2) it's is not *electrically* compatible with the older scsi revisions. And so *has* to revert to standard scsi signalling if there is a standard scsi device on the bus.

    Don't post bullshit.
  • and how is firewire than scsi??

    firewire is what: 200 or 400Mb/s, scsi is currently at 80MB/s with LVD.

    scsi has a sizeable lead.
  • While that maybe true [I know *i* haven't seen it]. The reason it isn't done is with UltraWide SCSI 3 you can't have a total length greater than 2 feet [they say 3 but even with the best shielded cables, I've found I have problems over 2 feet]

    With SCSI LVD, you can have longer cable lengths, but still no where *near* as long as you can w/SCSI

    Has it been mentioned that SCSI "dumbs down" to the slowest device on the chain? So even if you have that kickarse U2W card and 3 U2W devices, if you stick that narrow scsi2 on the chain you are going at a bus speed of about 10MB/s Boo! hiss!

    Firewire also has Isochronos transfers.

  • Those cameras are also computer peripherals. You can hook 'em up directly to the computer and shuffle video back and forth. Most firewire devices are in fact peers (it reminds me of a small LAN), but not all devices can send commands to other devices like a computer or camcorder almost certainly would.
    The hotswappableness of the drives (even during transfers) is _very_ nice i hear. Still, my next drive will be SCSI, because I still have room on that bus for internal devices. Might as well make the most of it, you know. I'll get to externals once i fill my drive bays.

  • More FireWire drives (Score:3)

    by John Siracusa ( 4209 ) on Thursday May 06, 1999 @12:39PM (#1902042) Homepage
    Follow the link [maccentral.com]

  • Clearly you guys are missing the point (Score:5)

    by John Siracusa ( 4209 ) on Thursday May 06, 1999 @08:50AM (#1902043) Homepage
    This thing is the size of a big wallet and requires nothing but a FireWire cable to plug into it. It's from VST, a company that also makes a lot of notebook accessories and drives. This is not a giant desktop drive for use with digital video, nor is it representative of what a FireWire drive aimed at such a market could do. Get a grip.
  • Upgradeable? Officially, probably not. But in practice, what I think you'll find inside this box is a standard laptop IDE drive, and a small adapter card with a "tailgate" chip (Symbios SYM13FW500 or equivalent). So you probably could replace the drive. The box is only 17mm tall, so at most there's only room for a 12.5mm tall drive, or maybe only a 9.5mm or 8.5mm. They can't suck enough power from 1394 for a huge drive; even their external power supply is probably not sufficient.

    It would be nice to find a cheap source for tailgate adapters. Last time I checked, Symbios (now absorbed by LSI Logic) wanted several thousand dollars for the development kit, so I didn't buy one. But the actual chips are under $10, and only need a handful of inexpensive passive components to make them work.

  • This makes me think they just glued some cheap IDE drives to the FireWire port.
    Yes, that's exactly what it is. A laptop IDE drive with a tailgate chip (Symbios SYM13FW500 or equivalent) tacked on.

    AFAIK, none of the drive vendors are mass producing drives with native 1394 interfaces yet. It's a catch-22; not enough computers have a 1394 port to justify making devices, and there are not enough devices to justify making 1394 a standard interface on computers. Apple and Sony are pushing it, but will they be enough?

    We have Intel to blame for this. They claimed that they would support both USB and 1394 in their chip sets, so that both would become ubiquitous. They put USB in, and that has been fairly successful. Now it's hard to buy a computer without a USB interface. But they forgot 1394, probably because they want to push USB 2.

    SCSI cabling is such a crock that I'd really like to move all my SCSI devices (such as scanner, DAT drive, and 8x CDR) to 1394. It's too bad there's not a single-chip adapter for SCSI devices like there is for IDE.

  • And neither will the Orb be. They're not trying to be a standard - if they were, Iomega wouldn't sue anyone who clones their floppies.

    Yes, you can't make Zip disks without permission from Iomega. Part of the agreement details you have to agree to Iomega's price fixing. That is one reason Zip disks still cost about $10 each [*cough* *sputter*].

    Give me CD-RW (which I have) and DVD-RAM (which I want). They may not be "THE" standrd, but they ARE standards, so anyone can follow them, so I can happily roll around in 50 cent blank CD's. I need another CD rack now!

    I know what you reall meant about standards.. I'm just trying to point out the difference between a standard and a monopoly -- just like Windows is the "standard" while UNIX is "a" standard.

    If you have a choice, investigate alternatives to Zip/Orb... portable CD-RW on USB (and soon FireWire) are excellent uses of the technology (as opposed to CD-RW drives linked via a Centronics printer port... bleck! :)
  • After futzing w/ the generic SCSI interface for a bit under Linux recently, I can say even w/ my bare modicum of exposure that, as interfaces go, SCSI sucks.

    Whether USB:The Next Generation or FireWire emerges as a viable standard (hey, why not both?), I just hope the specs aren't as screwy, or as, um, variegated (ultra, ultraWide, 1, 2, 3 .. round and round she goes, place your bets..).
    -----

  • While I have been patiently waiting for FireWire devices to out for quite some time, I have to wonder what advantage I gain in this age of Ultra2 SCSI. True, even high performing hard drives don't use all of the bandwidth available to them theoretically so sheer speed is not necessarily the issue. Clearly, being able to deliver some power down the Firewire chain is useful for laptops, but as we see with these drives, anything beyond one drive requires an AC adapter. Price considerations? FireWire is still expensive..does anyone know if this is inherent in its design? I wonder which can be more cheaply made. Hotswapping? Not really an issue for me at this time but definately ties into one of Firewire's only advantages: non-PC appliances. Sony is just about the only provider of Firewire enabled consumer electronics at the moment but Firewire videocameras and vcrs and dvd-recordables would be nice. Firewire zip drives would be nice...carry your drive to a friend and plug it in without having to reboot his machine. I'm curious what other advantages and disadvantages you perceive in the Firewire vs SCSI debate. BTW, I'm looking for a converter box to convert RCA-style composite or S-video into Firewire. I want my VCR to jack into a Firewire video capture card I have been eying. Please email me if you know of one.
  • There are some indications that FireWire is losing momentum in the PC industry. It should sto;; replace the RCA connectors in the consumer space (good riddance).

    People are just tired of waiting. The USB standard was started years AFTER FireWire and has already become a mass-market product. FireWire is still stuck with commitees and interoperability problems.

    The two last nails in FireWire's coffin (the first being Apple's ridiculous royalty claims) may be the USB upgrade to similar speeds (USB 2.0) and the upcoming ultrafast ATAPI standard based on serial signalling.

    I'm not saying it's totally dead, it may be useful in things like disk farms for video editing and Apple will surely use it, but it won't replace SCSI and ATAPI any time soon and USB 2.0 may be a cheaper and more available connection for video capture, digital satellite receivers, etc.
  • I hardly think you can compare IDE hard drives with winmodems. Winmodems are bastardized pieces of garbage. IDE....well, it's not SCSI, but they're still cool (for the price, that is)
  • Compare the Castlewood's Orb drive to VST's Firewire drive. The performance specs are close, but then the Orb takes the cake with removable media at about $30 per disk/cartidge whatever you call it. Not to mention more interfaces than you can shake a stick at. I would guess the SCSI versions probably would run under Linux too.

    ++++VST 2GB Fireware Harddrive++++
    http://www.vsttech.com/vst/techspecs.nsf/ByProdu ct/FW9520
    This is taken from the address above.
    -begin---------------------------------
    System requirements:
    Apple Macintosh G3 with FireWire or
    Apple Macintosh G3 with Apple 1394 PCI Card
    -end------------------------------------

    ++++Castlewood 2.2GB Orb Drive++++
    http://www.castlewoodsystems.com/castlewood/web/ orb_spec.htm
    This is taken from the address above.
    -begin------------------------------------------
    ORB is available as both external and internal models, with the following interfaces:

    External SCSI
    External Parallel Port
    Internal SCSI
    Internal EIDE
    External USB(Announced for demonstration at MacWorld 1999)
    IEEE 1394 FireWire (Announced for demonstration at MacWorld 1999)

    Operating Systems Compatibility
    Windows 98, 95, 3.1, NT 4.0+, MS DOS 5.0+, OS/2 4.0, Mac OS7.1+
    -end--------------------------------------------

    Ryan
  • At least this is true for the parallel port models. I bet it's true
    for the SCSI as well.
  • My schools main server has several ( 4 or more ) hard drives. To be able to configure such a system and get decent performance would be near impossible without SCSI. In contrast to IDE which cannot make use of more than 2 high performance devices ( try putting two hard-drives on one IDE chain and actually *use* the one on the slave ) , SCSI allows you to put several drives and other IO devices on a single chain ( which gets a single IRQ ) . SCSI is the only choice for a flexible, extensible high performance system.

    But it's a dog to set up. Hang in there, it will kick some butt once you have eveything working. Hang in there (-;

  • The hard drives are interesting for P1394 mindshare because they are obviously computer peripherals. Yes, they aren't amazing drives in themselves but they look pretty cool. The only other peripheral I can think of at the moment is a Sony audio/video A-D/D-A converter. In fact, Sony is pushing P1394 harder than Apple, with digital camcorders and the VAIO PCs.
  • Makes me wish I could have sourced a Sony Ultralight down here in Oz, rather than the Sharp Actius I've got. I spotted the FireWire, but I prefer local support...

    Is there any way of getting a FireWire port into a notebook / ultralight - does anything run fast enough? - My choices are really limited to USB, PCMCIA & IRDA 1.something (stop laughing).

    (How fast _does_ PCMCIA go?)

    Kris.

    Win a Rio [cjb.net] (or join the SETI Club via same link)
  • Gee, how fsck'n difficult is it to remember to put a terminator on the end of the bus? Do you have problems remembering to wipe after you use the bathroom? (Sorry I couldn't resist. But honestly do people really have that much difficulty remembering things? I guess that's why they have computer engineers that can do the technical work for end-users).

    Later SCSI standards allow 15 devices per card, and longer cable lengths.

    KISS is for stupid people, hence the last S...
  • When evaluating SCSI you really must consider it (at least in its present incarnations) to be a _performance-based_ standard. High-end SCSI is one hundred percent about maximum read/write speed at max high efficency. You don't honestly need to go with scsi unless you are working with applications that are extremely drive-intensive. Photoshop, Digital Video, Multitrack Digital Audio... Also for mission critical server data with RAID mirroring. SCSI is complicated because there are about a zillion different applications that it can be tailored for. The standards don't compete. They just go up in price and performance....

    All I gotta say is that Ultra2LVD is gonna kick firewire's ass for at least a year. I won't go firewire until it is performance proven.

    I don't mean to sound preachy :) but I looove SCSI
    -3jane
  • I don't really understand why you would want to buy this sort of thing. When you buy a firewire card, the idea is that you already have some sort of digital video cam or DV vcr laying around. The advantage there is that you can use the (expensive-ass) decoding hardware in the deck or camera - as well as transfer the data digitally. If you are starting with analogue video data, you would be much better off buying something like a Miro DC20 or some such encoder/decoder card. The usually have analog ins and outs for video and stereo audio (RCA) and provide the chipset to play back the hi-rez captured stream at (hopefully) a broadcast quality (30frames-60fields/sec). If you buy a firewire card without some firewire harware, you are no better off and out some bucks....
    BUT if this whole post is off topic and you DO have a DV cam, you have all the hardware you need right there! I am postive that the XL-1 (cannon) and the higher end prosumer Sony models have RCA ins for video and audio. You just digitize your signal there, then dump over the firewire and keep your workflow intact :)
    Ciao!!
    -3jane
  • Uh huh!

    And of course with ide/scsi you can hot plug the drives, and pull the plug while it is writing a file, then plug it back in and have it automatically finish writing the file.

    NOT!!!

    Dont let the speed of this little drive fool you. How fast was SCSI and IDE in their first generation?

    Firewire "A" is capable of handling 400mbs. That is 50 MegaBytes for all you people that cant do math.

    Lucent has demoed prototypes of Firewire running at 1.2Gbs. Thats 150Mega BYTES per sec. Apple also has the specs for 2.4Gb Firewire with will be demoed in 2002.

    Firewire is going to kick arse!

    Also, check out the physical size of the drive. It fits in your coat pocket. The next generation will also be bootable.

    Duh!

    Dont knock technology when it is only young, cause when it grows up, it's gonna come back and knock your face into the ground!


  • I have been waiting to see FireWire drives since I first heard of FireWire. I'm envisioning an all USB/FireWire system. No more IDE,SCSI,Serial,PS/2 etc. An internal USB port for small drives like LS-120, Zip, the Sony HDdisk, regular floppies and the normal two external USB ports for keyboards, scanners, mice etc. Then an internal FireWire port for hard drives (normal and RAID), DVD and CDs etc and then an external port for cameras external drives etc. It will be beautiful. Increased throughput and hotswapability (is that a word?) for all the drives. Hmmm...you could probably connect computers with their FireWire ports....400Mbps Beowulf cluster....Firewire can only have up to 67 (or is it 68?) devices, so a 67 node Beowulf cluster. COOL!
  • These are FIRST GENERATION which means they will be expensive, large IDE drives were expensive when they first came out. Firewire promises to be as expensive as IDE while outperforming SCSI. When production of drives like this moves into full swing by more manufacturers the price will drop signifigantly. If you want a swapable Zip drive buy a USB one. Once bandwidth gets faster than the drive can physically transfer data any extra bandwidth just means you can add more drives. Your actual data transfer is how fast the actual drive can do read/write operations. If I have an Ultra2 SCSI drive at 7200rpm it wont be a whole lot faster than my DMA/66 7200rpm IDE drive.
  • Do I really want to waste 800 or so megs on a keyboard mouse and scanner? NO. Jeez why does it have to be one or the other? How about USB for the smaller low capacity devices like scanners, printers keyboards and mice and then Firewire for the big boys? Hello McFly
    *knock knock*
  • These are not meant to replace your SCSI drives. The yare just a quick little removeable media. Later when you see big time Firewire drives at 7200 and 10000rpm and are unhappy, complain then.
  • But that's just what most Macintosh people are used too -- paying roughly 2-4 times what the PC world pays for comperable performance.

    Since the Mac uers that have stuck it out with Apple are used to spending money, don't look for Apple and it's drones to to come up with products that have broad compatibility and acceptance (and hence commodity pricing).
  • When you have a bunch of SCSI devices with no documentation and have to try to figure out which are terminated and need it turned off and how, SCSI termination can be a real pain (most of the hard drives I've used in the past few years have been salvage). It would be much simpler and nicer just to be able to plug and go. Yes, I can (usually) find the specs online, after a bit of a hunt, but that doesn't mean it's fun.
  • Upgradable? They are a brick with no power supply, 2 small connectors, and very simple electronics -- just buy a second one. Sure, they're a bit pricey now... they are first generation. Give em 6-12 months, and they'll come down.

    If you want a chassis, buy a SCSI drive and an external case. If you want something small, light, and cheap, go FireWire.
  • Yes, FireWire supports hotswapping... but be careful about unplugging a drive then plugging it in elsewhere. The hardware and drivers handle this fine, but the OS itself may not like a volume whose file system is in a bad state.

    Hotswapping is nice for reorganizing peripherals, and may work for read-only storage devices, but you still have to be careful. :)
  • What a moron...

    Because this drive is a slow performer I guess that means FireWire is slow. How about Seagate Quantum and IBM getting off their fat asses and making a FireWire native drive. FYI, the mechanism in these externals are portable size IDE drives. Speaking of a sucky technology...
  • Number one, Apple has already revised their firewire licensing. Get with it.

    Everyone is complaining about these firewire drives being slow. USB 2.0 (whenever it comes out) will be half as fast as current firewire, and probably 1/4 as fast as its contemporary firewire. USB 1.0 hard drives right now are a joke, and USB 2.0 hard drives will be just as much of a joke if/when they come out.

    Also, current USB and future USB do not guarantee bandwidth. Say goodbye to consistent video editing. You have a USB 2.0 device and USB 1.0 device on the same chain? Normally, you would think that the 1.0 device would take a relative ratio of bandwidth compared to the 2.0 device. Nope. That USB 1.0 device will take up just as much bandwidth as the 2.0 device, effectively crippling it to half its transfer rate.

  • You can even unplug it during file transfer (Score:3)

    by webslacker ( 15723 ) on Thursday May 06, 1999 @12:42PM (#1902071)
    This is the coolest thing about firewire, even cooler than its size and not needing a power supply:

    You can unplug it during file transfer. Plug it back in and it completes the file transfer. Coolest shit in the world. It even works if you're playing a movie on the firewire drive. You're watching a Star Wars trailer off the VST drive and then -oops- your friend trips over the cable and unplugs it. Plug it back in and the movie picks up where it left off.
  • I think that is more an issue of the mechanism used, which is still an important consideration.
  • Besides, if they can do 5.5 MB second sustained then that is enough for a single DV stream.
  • Uhmm... for 100MB ZIP medias, $18 x 20 disks = $360... compare that with $299 for 2 GIG firewire. Even with 250MB ZIP and 2 GIG JAZ, still beats them in term of transfer rate and seek time no?


  • I still think Apple made yet another huge mistake by dropping SCSI (yeah, I know it's an "option"). From what I've been seeing, the BW g3s will be replaced by the next generation sometime this year, so if they were trying to get rid of SCSI, why not phase it out in steps, instead of changing everything completely.

    So how does this relate to the topic? Well, I'm glad to finally be seeing some stuff for firewire. I was worried there for a while.

    -----BEGIN ANNOYING SIG BLOCK-----
    Evan

  • Whoah! If these are for notebooks, why doesn't VST's web page say it supports the Sony VAIO series? I think all of those already have 1394 ports. I'm sure if Apple ever does release a new notebook that it will have a 1394 port, but the Sonys have been around already for several months. Unless you can boot a G3 from these drives, they seem a little pricy for Apple's desktop Macs. Also, I was hoping to see faster 1394 storage devices from the get go.

    If VST worked on getting the drives to work with the VAIO's it might push others to commit to more 1394 devices.
  • A closer look at the specs for these drives show them with a max transfer rate of 5.5 mb/sec. That's not much faster than say a SCSI I narrow hard drive!
  • MAN, You are lookin at some old cards!

    In addition to the 15 usable ID's per bus if the card and the OS supports LUN's there is another 8 per ID. Plus, you can have more than one bus with 15x8 addresses per card. I have a DPT raid controller with 3 busses and 39 devices attached to it. (HD's, CD, Tape, and yes a scanner) It is taking up only one IRQ! It maxes out at 46 devices!

    Research before you post, man!
    Johnny O
  • http://www.usb.org/faq/ans5.html#q32

    "
    Q32: How long of a cable can I use to connect my device?
    A32: In practice, the USB specification limits the length of a cable between full speed
    devices to 5 meters (a little under 16 feet 5 inches). For a low speed device the limit is 3
    meters (9 feet 10 inches).
    "

    I personally have my printer (full speed)
    hooked up over a fifteen foot cable, so that
    works.
  • They're slow as hell.

    Slow? Compared to a Zip or a Jaz drive they're pretty quick. These are not drives designed to be your main HD, they are portable HDs.

    The damn things have an average sustained transfer rate of 8MB/sec. [snip] Don't the USB HDs on the market now, go faster?

    USB has a max rate of 12 Mb(its)ps, that's 1.5 MB(ytes)ps. So no, a USB device with an ABSOLUTE maximum of 1.5 MBps transfer rate is more than 3 times slower than a VST FireWire drive with a 5.5 MBps transfer rate.

    My IDE drives go faster than that! I really hope nobody gets suckered into buying these things.

    Are your IDE drives packaged to fit in your pocket? Are they hot swappable? Do they get power from the IDE chain? Do you even HAVE an external IDE port?

    These drives should be compared to Jaz disks and other removable media, not fixed HDs.
  • I haven't been keeping in touch with the PC-world Firewire effort lately. What would be the necessary components (hardware & software) to use this puppy on a PC running Win98 or Win2K? I haven't seen any PC interface cards besides the video editing stuff and TI's developer kits.

    Is Win98 Firewire support limited to Device Bay?

  • There is a site selling firewire products at Firewire Stuff [firewirestuff.com]. They list a bunch of upcoming products and some hard drives by MacTell.
  • FirePower has also some FireWire drives. Faster and bigger.

    http://www.firepower.com/products/FireDrivespecs .html
  • >- Visigothe said: "...UltraWide SCSI 3 you can't have a total length greater than 2 feet [they say 3 but even with the best shielded cables, I've found I have problems over 2 feet]..." isn't the cable length 3 METERS, not feet? Cause a lot of cabling comes in 3 feet length in enterprise-level servers... At Paralan.com [paralan.com] I found an extender cable to give SCSI a length of 2.5 MILES! I do not know how well it works (they say 40MB/Sec throughput), and it is pricey (fiber optic cabling), and I am not exactly sure why one should use it, but it is pretty nifty... you can spread your computer all over town! -G.
  • I'd wager that your "bare modicum of exposure" has led you to a poor conclusion ("SCSI sucks"). SCSI is the most flexible and capable drive interface in wide production. It has excellent backwards compatibility and still more room for future growth (Ultra3, et. al). Yes, if you don't know what you're doing, a SCSI chain can be tough to put together correctly. But then again, so can Linux.
  • Check out http://www.MacKiDo.com/Hardware/USB20.html [mackido.com] for some good background
  • I agree with you that the transfer rate/seek time is much better than the Zip drive, but the cost of the disks has really come down in the last year or so. If you wanted a quantity of 20 it should be less than USD 10 for each one.

    I'd rather have this drive than a Zip drive, if I had Firewire on all my computers.

    Jack
  • Sony's VAIO notebooks have Firewire ports built-in. (Or at least some do, including their smallest one.)

  • Are they upgradeable? I doubt it.

    Wouldn't it make more sense for them to
    sell a Firewire-based portable chassis, into which you could install disks of any capacity?

  • The drives look cool. They're small. They're ugly, yet streamlined. They're slow as hell. The damn things have an average sustained transfer rate of 8MB/sec. My IDE drives go faster than that! I really hope nobody gets suckered into buying these things. Don't the USB HDs on the market now, go faster?
  • Nice! That's a pretty sweet feature but I can't imagine it is supported. I just read that Windows 98 2nd release will support Firewire.
  • Nodding my head in agreement - think about how much easier it would be if all interfaces had easy pass-through allowing simultanous connection of similarly wired devices ...

    SCSI has it, but only to a degree and with quite a few problems with termination, incompatibilities between devices, devices with hard-wired SCSI IDs ...

    A set-up with all USB (for small things) and FireWire (for the big guns) and maybe some sort of SuperDuper thing for those things to come which would exhaust firewire but which would share the pass-through trasnparency would be perfect.
  • For removable, portable storage, the Castlewood ORB drive (http://www.castlewood.com) will be a much better choice when the FireWire version is released. (right now only SCSI, EIDE, and parallel are available). It has many advantages:

    SPEED: The ORB has a sustained transfer of 12.2 MB/sec and burst of 20

    PRICE: $200 for the drive (though the FireWire could be a little more pricey) and an estimated $30 per 2.2 GB cartridge.

    EXPANDABILITY: I don't want to have to buy a whole new drive when I run out of space

    PORTABILITY: how nice it would be if this drive became as standard as Zip, only little cartridges to carry around and pop in wherever.

    I hope this drive catches on and puts Iomega out of business.
  • IDE drives are cheaper 'cause there's no smarts on the drive itself.

    I think that the incredibly low price of IDE has much more to do with market forces than technology. There's way more volume and competition with IDE. -Bruce

  • These drives are much slower than they could be over FireWire. Methinks they were designed with portability in mind, not speed. There are much faster FireWire drives available (there are links in pervious messages).
    Relatively long time reader, first time writer btw...

    -Rafi

  • Hmmm. Let's try this again. NO USB does NOT do 12Mb's a sec. And most serial interfaces I can think of is mesaured in bits a sec (ever heard if the serial port modems are connected to?). And USB and FireWire are both serial interfaces like EtherNet is.

    Not that it matters how you measure it as long you use the right numbers. But the 12 number is in BIT's a sec. Try looking at this pice I found at Apple's site (not being able to find a spec on usb.org. You can say alot about Apple. But they don't lie about these things) :

    Performance Comparison.
    USB offers data transfer rates of up to 12 megabits per second, more than 1200 times faster than the 10 kilobits per second provided by Apple Desktop Bus ports (shown here as 1 pixel, though the speed actually scales to less than 1/3 pixel) and more than 50 times faster than the 230 kilobits per second of traditional Apple serial ports.


    Try getting the facts right before you rant at somebody!

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