Is Firewire on its way out?

Mac or PC? If Mac, Intel or PPC(G3, G4, G5)?

That is actually important if you use a Mac.

If you are using Windows or Linux I would just get a USB drive.

PC. What should I use Firewire for? I think my router is there now. Is that a mistake? I need to use it because I have filled up all of my USB jacks.

The router should use the Ethernet port if it is plugged into your computer. Firewire is really only used for hard drives and video cameras.

I would buy a (powered) USB hub. Mine turns one USB port into seven. Just make sure that it is powered. I got mine for under ten bucks.

edit :: Does what the router use look like a big telephone wire? If it does that is Ethernet.

My bad, my router is in the Ethernet port.
Which is faster, Firewire or USB 2.0? Is a USB 3.0 on the horizon?

I prefer Firewire. It seems to provide a better sustained throughput. And I daisy-chain a bunch of drives. I have three hard drives that plug into each other. It only uses one port on the computer. And they are all still really fast.

I would use Firewire if you can. It is normally only an extra 10 bucks to get one that has both. Options are good. All my drives have both.

So the industry will continue to support Firewire for the time being? Are you familiar with the 1 terabyte drives that have an identical backup for all data (I think it is two 500 GB RAID)? Do you recommend this?

It should support Firewire for a while. And most drives have a USB port too so it doesn’t matter. I plug mine into my sisters Acer laptop all the time that only has USB.

RAID is not for backing stuff up. Imagine this. One of your drives gets fucked up. Oh, it is on a RAID. No worries. Well, the fuck up just got pushed to the other drive. Now both drives have corrupted data.

Trust me. I made the same mistake.

You need a real strategy to back-up your data.

Yes, I heard if a virus attacks one side of RAID it gets pushed to the other side. Not ideal. Thank you for your expertise.

i must say i love firewire, http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3444/3184487985_f80ce274b8_b.jpg these are chained through FW800, and the speed is phenomenal really

btw. when troubleshooting a mac, firewire is the best tool you’ll ever have, it’s so versatile ! and with firewire 1600 and 3200 on the way, USB 3.0 is nothing to worry about

@iwamoto :: I do the same. Firewire is awesome.

It is good, isn’t it.

I would stick with USB if you use a PC. Most laptops lack Firewire.

Most Macs have Firewire. Only the Air and MacBook ship without.

Now I must watch Skins.

My HP dv2000 SE has Firewire. For the money you can’t get one more loaded.

In my experience most portable or external hard drives are built using USB, and items which really need the advanced speed (such as the Sony professional HD camera 1TB hard drive I used in university, many other video cameras too) use Firewire.

The question ultimately is, are you willing to exchange the versatility of your hard drive for the read/write speed increase? While you can buy Firewire cards for your PC, most PCs and hardly any non-Mac laptops (and even there I think they cut it on some models) have a Firewire port, which means you won’t be able to connect it easily. If you have no intention of moving the hard drive around to other computers, then by all means go for the Firewire one.

Personally my computer runs almost all the time so I don’t need the fast read/write for a weekly backup or large file transfer, and I enjoy moving the hard drive around to grab media from others, so I have chosen a USB hard drive.

Thank you all for the information. It’s a tough decision but I’m going to go with…(drumroll please) Firewire. I put extra RAM on my desktop and paid more for my laptop so I could run Vista fast. I don’t want any component that will slow things down and John said his dual port drives work with either so I am set. Thank you again and have a good day all.

Apple has been setting the trends in the computer industry for 20+ years.
They have decided to NOT include a FireWire port on their latest laptop.. for what it’s worth

Firewire 400 was faster and more reliable than USB 1.0. USB 2.0 is comparable to Firewire 400. The Windows side of the computer industry uses USB almost exclusively; this drives the price of Firewire up and the price of USB down. So for external hard drives, you wind up needing to pay a premium to get any interface other than USB (and often a hefty premium to get Firewire 800), and now that USB is good enough (and fast enough), few people bother with Firewire.

On the other hand, Firewire is still the interface for digital video cameras in realtime. So it’s probably not going away any time soon.

FW400 is faster over the average than USB2.0. FW800 is twice faster than that.

The Firewire standard also allows for you to use an external FW-mounted drive for bootup (called target mode)... something USB cannot do at all.

Rainer Brockerhoff makes a good explanation as to why the new Macbooks don’t have a firewire port… there’s simply no room for it.

So no, it ain’t going away anytime soon. It still offers unique capabilities and performance.

Actually, USB allows you to use an external disk for bootup—target disk is when you treat the computer’s hard drive as an external hard disk for some other computer.

@cwilbur, not sure where I read that about not being able to boot from USB… but I looked around and you’re right. If the PC’s BIOS supports bootup from USB device and your particular USB is up to snuff, then yes, you can boot from USB.

Target Mode (a.k.a. Target Disk Mode) is unique to Mac (at least as I intended it). According to Wikipedia:

TDM is a boot mode for some Macintosh computers wherein the Mac does not load the operating system, but instead behaves as a FireWire mass storage device with the SBP-2 (Serial Bus Protocol) standard.

When booted to TDM, all of the computer’s attached volumes (HFS+ volumes, MS-DOS volumes, DVD-ROM, etc.) appear as devices attached to the hub. It is possible to daisy chain several Macs together by booting them each to Target Disk Mode. All of the volumes on all of the computers will be available to the host computer at the end of the chain.

Target Disk Mode is the preferred form of old-computer to new-computer interconnect used by Apple’s Migration Assistant.