July 25, 2007
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FireWire
FireWire kicks ass!FireWire is the coolest thing ever!
FireWire is badass!
No, really!
You get FireWire drives and you can move files at FOUR HUNDRED MEGABITS PER SECOND!!1!! That’s badass!
Unless, of course, you’re moving it between different devices on the chain. I mean, duh. Then it’s kinda slow.
BUT FIREWIRE IS BADASS!!11!
(Here’s a word problem: A train leaves the FireWire host on the computer at 400 megabits per second. A train leaves the external hard drive at 400 megabits per second. They’re on the same track. How long before they collide?)
Update: Hey, I just found a solution to my 16 MB/s file transfer problem: USB 2.0. I’m so glad I had the foresight to get external hard drives with FireWire *and* USB. 222 MB/s. Plug one in the FireWire, and the other in USB. My backup won’t take all night now.
I know you were all *very* concerned.
By the way: SuperDuper! is a program I left off of the list of Mac software I made a while back. It’s all-round excellent, and it keeps all of the file system’s metadata, which other products do not.
This has been…. possibly the lamest ‘blog entry ever.
Comments (6)
all righty…
Isn’t the *point* of Firewire to be able to move stuff from one device to another? Or is that the obvious irony that I should be picking up?
I always felt that USB2.0 was inferior to firewire. Currently I have an external HDD drive hooked up to a DAW interface (presonus firebox) that’s going into the PC. Not sure if aything is bottlenecked. My multi-track program is accessing up to 20 wav files at once without any hiccups. Don’t notice any difference between chaining the HDD or hooking it up directly to the PC.
Ain’t got no love for the fiRIZZLES wiZZLES?
All this is not lame at all for a person who is good with software, lame with hardware, and realizing maybe she should have a better understanding of how her Mac works.
Hehe.. OK, here’s the explanation: I have an 80 gig external hard drive that I use for my archive of photos. It became completely full after I got back from my big trip to TX.
So I bought a 180 gig external hard drive that will be the new archive drive, and the 80 gig will take up a new role as system backup for my MacBook.
Now, in order to hook both up simultaneously over FireWire, they all have to be in a daisy-chain. So while the computer is reading a file from the 80gig drive, it can’t write a file to the 180gig drive. It has to wait. Throughput goes into the toilet, because these are pretty much all 10meg files, and because neither a Finder copy nor SuperDuper! are willing to use the MacBook’s internal hard drive as a buffer. If they did, it would be much faster. Maybe I’ll send the SuperDuper! guy an email about it.
Anyway. By using FireWire for one drive, and USB for the other, this bottleneck problem goes away. The throughput improves a bit. If it were USB 1, that solution wouldn’t work, cuz USB 1 is sloooow.
I actually do like the FireWire. Especially FW800, which sadly my MacBook doesn’t support.
Ah I see now, yes yes. And I have felt the wrath of USB 1.1, where I was scanning 35mm film in high resolution to my old laptop that did not support 2.0.
My gf’s MBP has fw800 that I’m dying to try out, but for which I have nothing to try it out with. Surprised to see that it had a different connection too, unlike usb which has kept their plugs the same.