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FireWire biggest supporter was Apple and now it looks like Apple getting ready to dump them within the next 4-5 years. USB is more "universal". Everything is USB. Firewire looses the speed advantage with USB 3.0 as it still faster than FW 3200. Personally, I think that eSATA/USB (You know those dual eSATA/USB ports that some Dells and Toshibas have) are the future and hopefully we will see them on future Macs.

I know that wikipedia isn't always the most reliable, but it does state 3.2Gb as the upper limit for USB3.0, so how are you saying that it's faster than Firewire 3200?
 
FireWire biggest supporter was Apple and now it looks like Apple getting ready to dump them within the next 4-5 years. USB is more "universal". Everything is USB. Firewire looses the speed advantage with USB 3.0 as it still faster than FW 3200. Personally, I think that eSATA/USB (You know those dual eSATA/USB ports that some Dells and Toshibas have) are the future and hopefully we will see them on future Macs.

USB DOESN'T HAVE ENOUGH POWER!
linkz0r:)
 
You realize we all effectively have FW3200 ports on all current Macs and MacBooks?

When manufacturer's release 1600 and 3200 devices, they'll plug into the 800 port but we'll get 3200 speeds as FW800 is forwards compatible.

There's a lot of decent USB 3.0 vs FW800 articles on the net, and the consensus appears to be FW being a much better technology than USB (which it always has been) but USB has the advantage of being slightly cheaper for iPods and things. But if I'm buying another external drive, there's no question it'll be a firewire drive and not a USB drive. USB just takes up too much of my CPU… (Firewire uses none)

If you were correct, don't you think that Apple would be advertising our FW ports as FW3200?
 
eSATA sucks on Macs. It may be the fastest interface but the support for it is extremely horrible.

At the moment, Firewire 800 is the best interface for macs.


As for USB 3.0, it may not be faster than Firewire 3200 for a while since it takes time for the technology to improve to 5Gbps. With firewire, we know it can go to the max possible speed. USB really depends on a lot of things to get the max speed, cpu + drivers + chipset all needs to be at the top game in order for USB to work well. Firewire, everything is at the firewire chipset. Unless USB 3.0 will include its own chipset to do the work, last time i check, it doesn't appear to be so.

Some tests with external HDD showed that the full speed of the HDD was utilized using USB 3.0 as if it was an internal HDD. USB 3.0 is very good and in March USB 3.0 is widely supported by the big manufactures. ;)

SO i really would like to see USB 3.0 on the new MBP
 
Some tests with external HDD showed that the full speed of the HDD was utilized using USB 3.0 as if it was an internal HDD. USB 3.0 is very good and in March USB 3.0 is widely supported by the big manufactures. ;)

SO i really would like to see USB 3.0 on the new MBP

Fry's electronics already has USB 3.0 PCI Express and ExpressCard solutions, but I didn't check to see if they had mac drivers. I think I may have seen a 3.0 enclosure too. Any one with the the 17 inch mbp, early 15" unibody or old school macbook pro will be able to achieve faster speeds than the most recent SD card unibodies.

I would have gotten one but I'm holding out for more enclosures.
 
i hope FW 3200 will make it out. USB is no match for FireWire.

the main speed difference is FW has it's own dedicated controller, it doesn't utilize CPU cycles as USB. and the power advantages and daisy-chaining possibility of FW.

The theory of USB 3.0 looks nice on paper, but FW 3200 would be as fast if not better in real-worl performance without putting a burden on CPU.
 
I know that wikipedia isn't always the most reliable, but it does state 3.2Gb as the upper limit for USB3.0, so how are you saying that it's faster than Firewire 3200?

Wikipedia says that USB 3.0 has max rate of 4.8 Gbit/s (vs 3.2 Gbit/s for FireWire S3200) which probably means that we will never see any real implementation of FireWire S3200 (which is more expensive and slower)
 
I think Apple might wait it out until intel comes out with light peak that they help develop. It will have 10 gbps speeds with future revisions of 100 gbps possible. It might take a while to be implemented so maybe they will put usb3 on it until then. Apple is usually the first ones to get rid of older technology in favour of better ones, so maybe they want to avoid putting usb3 if they will just have to get rid of it later on.
 
It's about 1-2 Mac cycles away for Light Peak - I'd imagine they'd still offer USB (though it'd be an interesting bold move if they didn't!) through USB3.
 
Wirelessly posted (iPod Touch 2G 8GB: Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

Lightpeak?!?!
 
God I hope eSATA isn't the way forward for external drives.

Its the worse designed connector I have EVER come across.

I used to have a 2.5" eSATA HD as storage and a 500Gb eSATA and gave up with it and bought a 1Tb FW800 drive instead not used eSATA since.

Stupid bloody connector.
 
Luckily for those with Express Cards, at least USB3 will be available for Expresscard 34 (Belkin has one coming out), and maybe even a FW update.
 
I don't think Apple will ever go for eSATA. I think we'll see them include USB 3.0 followed by Lightpeak. I love Firewire but I think, unhappily, that its days are numbered. But I'm just guessing. I would like to see FW 1600 and 3200, I'm just not sure Apple will bother.
 
My understanding was that something like Light Peak was pointless. The propogation delay of converting from electrical to optical and back again was too high for it to be practical to make such short distance optical cables.
 
My understanding was that something like Light Peak was pointless. The propogation delay of converting from electrical to optical and back again was too high for it to be practical to make such short distance optical cables.

Not sure what you mean by propagation delay of converting.... There is a propagation delay associated with any signal, and then there is a processing delay when converting the signal from electrical to optical domains (and vice versa). Two different things. But still, optical signal will propagate in an optical cable very close to the speed of light in a vacuum. We can't really do much better than that (as of now). There is also a processing delay, but even the cheap LED sources can easily modulate the signal at over 2Gbps, and now probably even at 10Gbps (if not, relatively cheap lasers can easily do that). So really, any type of delay associated with the optical signal would be the least of my concerns.
 
You realize we all effectively have FW3200 ports on all current Macs and MacBooks?

When manufacturer's release 1600 and 3200 devices, they'll plug into the 800 port but we'll get 3200 speeds as FW800 is forwards compatible.

There's a lot of decent USB 3.0 vs FW800 articles on the net, and the consensus appears to be FW being a much better technology than USB (which it always has been) but USB has the advantage of being slightly cheaper for iPods and things. But if I'm buying another external drive, there's no question it'll be a firewire drive and not a USB drive. USB just takes up too much of my CPU… (Firewire uses none)

That is incorrect.

As previously mentioned, it will still need a new chip, however, the chip is all that needs to be changed.
The goal is to simply change the chip, and you have FW3200 (and older computers can be retrofitted).

...hopefully, and one day...
 
Thunderbolt?!

What about Apple/Intel's Thunderbolt on Macs I know this thread is old but Thunderbolt is real-world 10GB/s!!!!!
 
What about Apple/Intel's Thunderbolt on Macs I know this thread is old but Thunderbolt is real-world 10GB/s!!!!!

I remember seeing a demo of FIREWIRE 3200 at WWDC almost ten years ago. I think it was way ahead of its time, but there wasn't much industry support for it.

Of course, thunderbolt is a better technology, and at least with Intel, Apple has industry support.

Lets hope those chips get cheap and adapters get plentiful.

Maybe in 2012, we'll see thunderbolt get adopted.
 
Sorry for reviving an old thread, but it's better than creating a new one when this is already established.

I just ordered the LaCie Quadra USB 3/FW800 RAID external. I did this because my two other externals use FireWire 800.

Because FireWire has been phased out, I'm wondering whether I made the right decision. The thunderbolt model is only $100 more than the one I purchased.

What do you guys think?
 
Sorry for reviving an old thread, but it's better than creating a new one when this is already established.

I just ordered the LaCie Quadra USB 3/FW800 RAID external. I did this because my two other externals use FireWire 800.

Because FireWire has been phased out, I'm wondering whether I made the right decision. The thunderbolt model is only $100 more than the one I purchased.

What do you guys think?

It depends. The drive would probably run decently over USB 3.0, but Firewire 800 is too slow to really get good speeds out of the drive.

If you don't have/don't want to use USB 3.0 you should get the Thunderbolt model, especially if it's a 4 drive version.
 
It depends. The drive would probably run decently over USB 3.0, but Firewire 800 is too slow to really get good speeds out of the drive.

If you don't have/don't want to use USB 3.0 you should get the Thunderbolt model, especially if it's a 4 drive version.

No, it's just the two drive version, which we'll be used in RAID 1. I know USB 3 will be plenty fast for that, but the problem is that my two other externals will quickly fill my USB3 ports. That's why I love the idea of daisy chaining.

What's your take on that?
 
No, it's just the two drive version, which we'll be used in RAID 1. I know USB 3 will be plenty fast for that, but the problem is that my two other externals will quickly fill my USB3 ports. That's why I love the idea of daisy chaining.

What's your take on that?

Go for Thunderpantzzzz :D Haha seriously daisy chaining makes life so much easier (when done right of course) and your not stressing over limited ports. 2 USB ports on MBP's is so annoying, 3 would have been nice BUT you can take advantage of unused thunderbolt ports and leave room for things that need USB, even if you don't use the full speed of thunderbolt its nice to have room on one side of the computer for other USB devices.
 
Go for Thunderpantzzzz :D Haha seriously daisy chaining makes life so much easier (when done right of course) and your not stressing over limited ports. 2 USB ports on MBP's is so annoying, 3 would have been nice BUT you can take advantage of unused thunderbolt ports and leave room for things that need USB, even if you don't use the full speed of thunderbolt its nice to have room on one side of the computer for other USB devices.

I'm sorry, I know this is the MacBook pro thread, but I have a new 2013 iMac. It was just relevant because it was about FireWire. Thus, I actually have four USB ports.

Does that change anything lol?
 
No, it's just the two drive version, which we'll be used in RAID 1. I know USB 3 will be plenty fast for that, but the problem is that my two other externals will quickly fill my USB3 ports. That's why I love the idea of daisy chaining.

What's your take on that?

Honestly, one drive is going to saturate Firewire these days, so you really won't be getting full speed out of it with Firewire. It won't be horrible, but it won't be optimal.
 
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