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

[Rick Moen]

Quoting one of my old posts:

> The real reason I don't _expect_ to see Firewire or USB connectors
> directly on hard drives is (1) modularity and (2) economies of scale.  
> It's conceivable that you might see trick widgets or cables that do
> (e.g.) SATA/USB conversion, but I doubt there's much market for them,
> which would inflate unit costs (and thus prices), which in turn would
> further limit market potential.  But I'd love to be proved wrong.

A couple of recent visits to Best Buy brought home to me an obvious fact
that I'd sort of forgotten:  Both USB and Firewire are pretty much
inherently _external_ types of device connection.

Best Buy does stock "USB hard drives", as it turns out -- those being a
sealed bundle of plain ol' PATA drive + USB enclosure + PATA/USB bridge
chip -- for a fair premium over the drive itself.  There seems to be a
nice little market segment for those things, which on reflection makes
sense, given the wider use of laptops.

Alas, Firewire continues to wane, and vanish from the commodity market.