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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
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Wednesday, October 23, 2002
20:39 - Slow and fugly wins the race
http://www.xbitlabs.com/storage/usb20-fw/

(top) link
Marcus points me to this bake-off at X-bit Labs between external FireWire and USB 2.0 drives. USB 2.0, you'll recall, is the 480MBps version of USB that's supposed to beat the tar out of the 400MBps FireWire, just as the latter has become established as the interface of choice for A/V and other media transfer type stuff.

I've talked before about the technical merits of FireWire vs. USB 2.0 (namely, the six-pin noiseless differential design versus the four-pin noisy design that must be shielded, as well as other things like FireWire's peer-to-peer symmetry). I had to come to the conclusion, though, that it's another case of "good enough"-- all USB 2.0 has to do in order to become dominant is to come within barking distance of FireWire, and for most people it'll serve whatever purpose they'd had in mind.

(Never mind that FireWire at 2x and 4x speeds is already in the spec, and ready to be rolled out at any time, using more efficient utilization of the available pins and cycles, as with gigabit Ethernet; whereas USB can only be enhanced further by bumping the clock speed still higher.)

Apple did charge royalties for FireWire during its formative period, which I'm sure the stockholders found to be a good decision when it was the fastest thing on toast; then they stopped charging when USB2 became a legitimate competitor. I don't think FireWire's adoption by videocameras and mass-storage devices was hampered much by the fee. (The little 1394 port on my cheapass camcorder says otherwise, at least.) Either way, that isn't what's fueling the current gravitation toward USB 2.0 these days.

But at any rate, these benchmarks show the USB 2.0 drive lagging pretty severely behind both FireWire and ATA-100 (which run pretty much neck-in-neck for most of the operations, and track the same curve patterns, whereas the USB drive hits internal bottlenecks).

Even so, the site concludes with a sigh,

So, let's take the results into consideration and wait for future USB 2.0 tests.

It's important as this interface is becoming a standard de-facto and we all will have to put up and work with it…

'Twas always thus, and always thus shall be.

Ah well. Maybe at least some of the real speed tweakers will see reports like this and conclude that FireWire is in fact something worth supporting. After all, they're the ones who direct the course of the whole rest of the tech industry...



UPDATE: Den Beste has his own results, using a test rig that was manufactured this century. Yes, it did raise an eyebrow or two when I saw XBit's "Coppermine" platform...



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© Brian Tiemann