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New Firewire tech to offer 3.2Gb/sec
Author: Gareth HalfacreePublished: 17th December 2007
The Firewire S3200 connector will look just like current Firewire 800 connectors.
Using the same physical connectors as the current Firewire 800 standard (so called due to the 800Mb/sec transfer rate), S3200 promises to shift data to and from external devices at an eye-watering 3.2Gb/sec. To put it into perspective, that's the equivalent to a 4.7GB DVD ISO every 12 seconds.
There are also hints that the Trade Association may be putting the standard forward as a successor to HDMI. The original press release announcing the standard claims that the new standard is “fast enough to move even uncompressed HD signals over long distances at much lower cost than solutions such as HDMI.” Whether we need a replacement to HDMI or not, the TA is certainly hoping there's a market for it.
Although likely to be the first next-generation connectivity standard to hit the market – ratification is expected in February 2008, and the similarity to existing Firewire tech should make it quick to manufacture – Firewire S3200 is facing competition from the imaginatively named USB 3.0 standard.
Intel--a major investor in USB technology--has predicted that USB 3.0 will reach maximum throughputs of 4.8Gb/sec, a major step up from S3200. Even so, Firewire has always had the edge performance-wise over USB due to lower CPU overheads so we'll have to wait until products based on both standards are actually released before we can declare an outright winner.
Both technologies are expected to be finalised in the first half of 2008, although it'll be a while after that before we start seeing commercial production.
Looking forward to multi-gigabit speeds to your external storage, or will you be sticking with USB? Perhaps you're already enjoying blazing speeds via eSATA? Let us know via the forums.
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Comments (26)
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Especially with competition between Firewire and USB, the consumer wins again!
I wish they'd make Firewire S3200 100% hot-pluggable though..
A few of the Firewire-based devices I have came with warning cards directing me to never connect or disconnect firewire devices while either of the devices is powered on, due to risk of sparking and destruction of connected devices.
This makes it a pain in the ass to switch my M-Audio Firewire 410 Recording sound card from my Desktop system to my Laptop and vice versa.
I'm sure plenty of people hot-plug their FW devices regularly, but all the warning cards make me too scared to do it when my expensive hardware is involved..
Looking forward to multi-gigabit speeds to your external storage, or will you be sticking with USB? Perhaps you're already enjoying blazing speeds via eSATA?
3200Mbits per second, so 400MB/s, so realisticly (going on past firewire performance) about 350MB/s tops. Beyond what a single hard disk will do today, but you already get external RAID 0 arrays that are floating about as external hard disks - those can probably manage in the region of 150-180MB/s, and with SSD's taking off and in theory being able to be a fair bit fast this should give plenty of room for the future. And afterall, who can complain that their interface is faster than it needs to be?
Personally, I'm sick and tired of USB with it's high CPU usage, its rubbish sustained speeds, it's inability to claim a specific volume of bandwidth for a device (for guarenteeing realtime playback) and it's general crappyness in comparison to firewire. So I hope that this new firewire standard gets much more integrated and used by everyone, not less so.
Firewire has been deserving to take the crown as the bus standard for years, and although I honestly don't expect it, I really do hope that this can help it at least be put on equal footing with USB, and maybe even supplant it as the univeral bus.
Chances are it can be, all other firewire specs so far have had the capacity to be used as ad-hoc LAN cables. Should provide significant speed increases over gigabit too, although most people won't notice them, and the limiting factor that it's point to point would probably put off most people.
Firewire always seemed the cleverer approach, but how often do those fail to win over some well marketed sub-standard alternative?
As said, USB is far too standardised for firewire to become mainstream quickly but who knows.
Whoa there man of the future! Some of us still enjoy our punch card archives of contemporary music. And young'uns nowadays claim that they can store large amounts of data. Hah! I'll show you large amounts of data. Lemme just find you a song for my dance organ and you shall see!
Sad, and true :(
The same reason we didn't have gigabit networking in the 80s
USB performace sucks and uses lots of CPU (cheap software USB chips, very rare to see hardware USB) only works with winME (crashme) or newer (natively)
Firewire i think has worked from windows 95 probly not tho, it worked on windows98 with out extra drivers for most devices
firewire is an hardware device never been software connection
be nice lol he may not have been even born yet in that time lol
Why would someone want to have even more wires around for this device, or that device, or another hub to get this device to reach the pc without having to bend over and go through the rats mess of ports. (granted most modders have already cut there common ports onto the top or front, if the case didn't already have em)
Just let it die. I expect that once power over ethernet is ratified, we will start to see even greater speeds over our lans, and the backbone side. But it is hard to beat that most of your Radio recievers and dvd players, (even games systems), are using USB.
Good plan, let's blame Apple
(Plus I think there's actually good reason too this time, bonus!)
IIRC Sony had something to do with it too...
1394 is the same as Firewire isn't it?:o
Competition is good. :)