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Following up an earlier post about some of the reasons Apple picked FireWire over eSATA in the new MacBook Pro range, let’s take a look at what’s in store for the future of FireWire. On the road map to succeed the current FireWire 400 and 800 standards are the aptly-named IEEE 1600 and 3200 ports. They are – you guessed it – twice as fast as the current implementations of the current IEEE 1394 interface – FireWire 400 and 800. Read more »
When Apple announced its updated line-up of MacBook Pro notebooks at WWDC, I couldn’t help but notice a certain pattern in the updates: the inclusion of the FireWire 800 port and the exclusion of a much-faster eSATA port. Let’s get the facts over with: FireWire and eSATA are both I/O interfaces that handle data transfer much better than USB. In fact, they can even be called the “professional’s choice” of I/O interface, with USB being more along the lines of the average consumer/computer user. FireWire 800 transfers data at a rate of 98.25MB/s while eSATA cranks out 300MB/s. Compare that with USB 2.0’s rate of 60MB/s and it’s easy to see why USB is a consumer-level I/O interface. But why did Apple pick FireWire over the much faster eSATA and what can we expect to be the de-facto standard for powerful data transfer in future Macs? Read more »