[conspire] questions re firewire pci card and firewire enclosure for 30GB hard drive

[Ross Bernheim]

On Dec 28,  02006, at 11:27 PM, Paul Reiber wrote:

>> No such thing ever existed
> ^^^ totally believable.
>
>  and never will.
> ^^^ totally unbelievable.
>
> I've not puttered with firewire to date; this much is obvious.
> However it seems simple enough that a drive manufacturer
> might provide firewire, USB, or other type interfaces.  They've
> provided SATA as an alternative to EIDE... what's next?

Paul,

It is a matter of economics of scale. IDE has much grater
volume of production than USB or Firewire. USB is also a
very limiting interface. Sata is an attempt to overcome some of
the limitations of the parallel ATA, primarily the large connectors
and wide cables. The large connectors are a problem as space
on motherboards gets tighter and form factors get smaller. Not
to mention the high costs involved in connectors and board
space. Sata uses smaller less expensive connectors. They also
went to higher speed capabilities and the motherboards also quite
often have more connectors than with the parallel ATA.

If the drive manufacturers wanted to produce a new standard for
drives, I would think they would go beyond the less than 400 Mb
data rate for sustained transfer of current USB and 1396A and go
with either the next generation of Firewire beyond 1396B (800 Mb)
and go with a fiber optic link and several Gb data rates.


Ross