USB 3.0 arriving - bring on the speed

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Not quite...

"We haven't really seen what USB 3.0 says about that yet.
That didn't stop adoption of USB 2.0, though. These days
there is a lot of CPU to spare, often in multiple cores, so
even though using CPU is a bad thing the drawbacks of
using the CPU may not be big enough to justify using
something else."

Not quite. Intel demonstrated USB 3.0 on a Linux machine
at CES. It managed speeds of about 5x faster than USB
2.0, well short of the 10x. Intel also stated in a myth
buster document that USB 3.0 will benefit from multi core
CPUs. That indicates that USB 3.0 speed is still dependent
on the CPU.

In terms of external storage and several consumer devices,
yes, USB was adopted over Firewire. Because Firewire
requires a dedicated host controller, it makes it more
expensive and larger where space is considered a
premium.

There are many justifications for using Firewire over
USB because of USB's dependency on the CPU. Most of all
is the professional audio and video markets. Even 8-Core
CPUs are being pushed to the max in the professional
market.

For example, when you're pulling HD DV from a camera,
you can't use USB. Most of your CPU is going to
processing the incoming video stream, and the stream
needs to be uninterrupted. Likewise with professional
audio equipment in which lots of data is transferred and
processed in real-time. You can't lose or reduce the
speed.

Also, as I mentioned in my other reply, Firewire is used
extensively in aviation and now automotive industries.
Recent ratification of the 1394c spec will increase its use
(and usefulness) to many different industries, allowing
Firewire to be run over standard ethernet. In combination
with an upcoming new PoE spec to push power to 24W,
Firewire is being considered as a cheap alternative to iSCSI
and fiber network storage.

So as I stated before, they're different markets. USB and
Firewire overlapped in consumer storage and briefly with
iPods, but that was about it. Many computers are still
equipped with Firewire 800, and it still makes a superior
connection for external, mobile storage.

"Being able to reassign addresses and IRQs and all of
that stuff is what makes hot swapping and plug and play
possible."

I understand that, but it's an absolutely horrible way of
managing external devices.

"Because it is meant for drives, not for general device
handling. It doesn't make sense to daisy chain drives."

Yes. Firewire, on the other hand, can be used for both.
Since a Firewire host controller talks directly to other
Firewire hosts, it doesn't even need a computer to do the
negotiating. Unlike USB, daisy chaining Firewire drives
does not significantly impact the speed of various attached
drives (or your computer's responsiveness.)

So having Firewire makes daisy chaining sensible especially
if you're hotswapping.

So this begs to question why people use eSATA. Probably
because eSATA is "cool" like USB, and that Firewire is "teh
suck." *roll eyes*

Posted by: olePigeon   Posted on: 01/13/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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