I just saw that eSata has external hard drives which is what I'm looking to get. Now my Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe MOBO has one external port eSATA already and I saw one at newegg:
http://www.newegg. com/Product/ Product.aspx? Item=N82E1682214 8153
My question is eSATA still too new with many bugs or is it ready to be used everyday?
jh <jhlists@hirschman. net> wrote: Mike wrote:
>
>
> I'm curious on what is better USB 2.0 or fireware? Now I heard USB 2.0
> hits 400Mbps but what does fireware hit? My next question is what uses
> fireware, anything useful or is it more for corporations rather than
> home users?
USB 2.0 is 480 Mbps, but Firewire 400, also known as 1394a, running at
400 is faster in the real world for things like storage. There is also
1394b, also called Firewire by many, which typically runs at 800 Mbps.
Firewire also tends to use much less CPU.
Firewire is also still used for video apps - you can transfer video from
camcorders using it, and even grab video from some cable boxes using it.
Firewire is interesting because it has most of the advantages of SCSI
(and now SAS) without any of the hassles.
Firewire was always a consumer standard, and priced accordingly. I can't
think of a non-video app that would be corp-centric.
Despite the fact that it is superior for I/O, it was never designed for
things like mice and keyboards (although it does support printers and
scanners), which is probably one reason why USB won out. The other was
that Intel gave away USB for free, while Apple tried to get royalties
for Firewire until it became clear that the standard suffered. Apple has
dropped Firewire at this point - the first iPod was Firewire only, for
example.
Interestingly, I just bought two Firewire cards and a hub for the
princely sum of about $60. Two little used aspects of firewire:
* You can use it as networking standard, where it competes with gigabit
Ethernet. But, as GigE has gotten so cheap, it really doesn't work as a
cheap high-speed networking interconnect any longer. It was pretty
wonderful for "desktop networks" a few years ago.
* You can actually use it to physically connect multiple computers to a
single storage device! You need a shareable filesystem to make this work
- not common in the consumer world - but it can be made to work as a
"ghetto SAN".
That's why I just bought my gear - I want to try some DIY SAN stuff, and
the price is a lot cheaper than Fibre Channel. If I get things to work
with 1394, well, I'm going to be buying some pretty high-end gear after
that and using the same configs. Linux lets you do cool things like that
