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Firewire/iLink speeds set to increase to 3.2Gb/s

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Carol Haynes:
A new standard is emerging which is faster than eSATA and even faster than HDMI transfer for uncompressed HiDef video.

See article at: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-6223102.html?tag=nl.e550

This will make external storage really rock - how long until USB catches up?

Lashiec:
Actually, IEEE 1394 new standard is late, as the USB 3.0 was announced in Intel's last IDF. And it's set to achieve even faster speeds than the new FireWire.

Which poses the question as if the HDDs can keep up with this or, more precisely, if everything will be wasted bandwidth, considering that the eSATA can achieve theoretical speeds closer to those of SATA II HDDs. I'm sure the new specifications will be used for some bandwidth-demanding applications (like HD video). (already mentioned by Carol, gosh! :-[)

f0dder:
* f0dder yawns.
Anyway, from everything I've seen, firewire has an advantage over USB in that it's better able to dedicate bandwidth to one high-speed device; so firewire-400 beats usb2-480.

Btw, individual disks still can't even saturate SATA-150, so SATA-300 speed only matters once you go RAID... and even then, it's only for the controller, not the individual drives, that it matters.

Carol Haynes:
The other advantage of Firewire is that it can supply more power to devices directly.

tomos:
but over the last couple of years I've read again and again (but where :-\) that firewire is not as dependable as USB

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