What is the main advantage of firewire over SCSI and IDE?

[Stylewar]

I currently run a 6.4 GB 5400 RPM HD. This is the only thing I have left to upgrade....I was possibly interested in going SCSI, but then heard about this firewire concept. I am new to firewire, so be gentle

Anyhow, is firewire faster than SCSI? Which would give me the most speed and bang for the buck when considering?

Thanx
Joe

 

[Vegito]

Firewire, like usb, plug in and run. scsi... plug in and configure and run.. I think scsi is faster but it still depends on a lot of thing..

 

[BDawg]

All the firewire drives I've seen are an IDE drive with a IDE/Firewire converter. We have 3 of them, 2 LaCie 30GB, and 1 45GB.

The only advantage is portability. You can hot swap the drive wherever you want.

 

[TimeKeeper]

BDawg:

Can you run some bench on your firewire HD?
You can d/l HD tech 2.61 from here.

I really like to know more about this technology , thanks.

p.s. I am more interested in the Average DATA transfer speed, not read burst.

 

[Sword]

BTW, firewire is based on SCSI.

It is not faster than the newer SCSI devices (U2W, U160 and U320).

If I remember well, firewire is like 300 MB/s = 300/8 Mb/s = 37.5 Mb/s.

Of course, firewire is "easier" to configure but SCSI devices are so easy to install now that I dont believe there is a big difference...

Can someone confirm this...i am not sure at all of what I am saying...

 

[Bignate603]

i thought the it was 400 megabits a second for firewire, but i may be wrong. Firewire i thought was usually for external devices so you could swap them. It's used at my school to plug the video cameras into the macs. I would go scsi. Once you got it in, you configure once and never look back.

 

[MotoKamui]

It is 400 Mbit/Sec. For the moment. Supposedly, there will be Firewire2.0 coming out sometime relatively soon with double(? It's atleast that much) the transfer rate. There are two parts to this equation though, first is the speed of the transfer protocol(IDE, SCSI, Firewire...) second is the physical capabilities of the drive... this is kinda like what's happening with the ATA/100 drives. They can transfer at 100MB/Sec but the drive heads can't keep up... Off the top of my head, I can't tell you how close SCSI gets to its theoretical numbers.

 

[Noriaki]

Just a tidbit on FireWire:

FireWire is Mac trademark, i.Link is a Sony trademark but both refer to a standard link known as IEEE1394.


Anyhow, 1394 is more comparable to USB than SCSI or IDE.
1394 is sort of to USB what SCSI is to IDE, 1394 is a higher bandwidth and much more effecient protocol, but it's used for very different things, and less commonly.
It's an external connection type that's hot pluggable. Sony uses it for Digital cameras, there are external hard drives on it, Yamaha makes CDRWs on it, but generally for your main hard drive you probably want SCSI or IDE. 1394 hard drives are good for portability but they aren't really meant for a main hard drive yet (AFAIK they aren't bootable..) and they are a fair bit more expensive than IDE drives, but won't perform as well as SCSI. So if you want super performance you want SCSI, cost effectiveness is IDE. You don't want your main hard drive on 1394.

However if you are looking for a fast portable storage and you have firewire on all the computers you want to use it for then a firewire hard drive might be a good choice.
Keep in mind 1394 PCI cards are still a bit pricey and most (PC) mobos don't have 1394 built in yet.

<<What is the main advantage of firewire over SCSI and IDE?>>
Portability over IDE and internal SCSI, easy of use and hot swapability over external SCSI (of course SCSI can be configured for hot swap but it's expensive).