this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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I remember having a FireWire in one of the family desktops when I was a kid. Can't remember what we might have used it for, though.
It resides in the same vague memory hole as the Zip drive that we had.
Firewire was phenomenal for external hard drives. The speed was almost as fast as the drives so you were rarely limited by the port.
Yep, that's because the actual data transfer was handled by the more capable device, instead of only the guest. I think the standard also required a minimum throughput, iirc, whereas USB only had a maximum.
Firewire was good for high bandwidth devices like external hard drives and video cameras because it didn't require the CPU to do any heavy lifting. These days USB is mature enough and CPUs are so fast that we (mostly) don't notice any performance impact but in the Core 2 Duo days you could easily max out one of your two cores with a large file transfer over USB.
Yeah, the ZIP drive was just starting to take off when the Internet killed needing a sneaker net (at least of that size). Add in CD-ROM drives which you needed anyway. And good night.
I had a FireWire hard drive! I remember I bought specifically the enclosure that supported both standards since my motherboard had a FireWire port and on paper it was faster than usb! Too bad the HDD was as slow as molasses