If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below. |
|
|
|
Thread Tools | Display Modes |
#1
|
|||
|
|||
FireWire 400 (IEEE 1394
Does anyone really use FireWire 400 (IEEE 1394. Or is that old
technology? One of my computers had a card in it for this, and I never knew what it was for. It just said IEEE 1394 on it. I finally looked it up. Yet, I have never seen anything with those kind of plugs on it. Maybe this is just something used for commercial applications, and not at home. It seems that almost everything these days is USB, except for the old style keyboard & mouse connectors (DIN). If this Firewire has any uses, what plugs into it? By the way, is Firewire approved by Fire Codes? |
#2
|
|||
|
|||
FireWire 400 (IEEE 1394
|
#3
|
|||
|
|||
FireWire 400 (IEEE 1394
On Sat, 21 Oct 2017 22:36:23 -0400, Paul wrote:
wrote: Does anyone really use FireWire 400 (IEEE 1394. Or is that old technology? One of my computers had a card in it for this, and I never knew what it was for. It just said IEEE 1394 on it. I finally looked it up. Yet, I have never seen anything with those kind of plugs on it. Maybe this is just something used for commercial applications, and not at home. It seems that almost everything these days is USB, except for the old style keyboard & mouse connectors (DIN). If this Firewire has any uses, what plugs into it? By the way, is Firewire approved by Fire Codes? There is a six pin and a four pin plug. The six pin has power on it. The four pin does not. A camcorder has a four pin. You can get six to four adapters which just drop the unused power wires. ******* Firewire can be used to capture content from a camcorder. Most of the people who actively continue to use Firewire 400, would probably use it for that. ******* Firewire is now too slow to be competitive with more modern enclosure interconnect. I have a couple 5.25" IDE enclosures with six pin interfaces on them. You can daisy chain them. The first enclosure in line, transfers at 30MB/sec. The second enclosure that comes after the first, gets 20MB/sec, and the chip inside the first enclosure re-clocks the data. Any USB2 enclosure can do better than that. And there's USB3, Thunderbolt, and ESATA for competition. ******* Firewire also supports networking. On a motherboard with Ethernet NIC as well as a Firewire chip. there are two MAC addresses. In theory, you could connect two PCs with a single Firewire cable, and use ICS to make the cable "live". Then do file sharing over it, and os on. GbE Ethernet can do 112MB/sec, whereas Firewire will be a lot less. Texas Instruments made some sort of Firewire hub, for networking, like a router of some kind or a switch. I've never run into anyone all that interested in networking over Firewire. Microsoft removed some level of Firewire shpport in the latest OS, so do not expect all of the above to work. ******* Firewire supports RDMA (remote direct memory access). This makes it possible for a forensics person to "dump" the contents of PC memory, even if you're using a screen lock. They can dump the *entire* memory. ******* Firewire provides bus power. Devices can be power providers or power consumers. The max voltage on Firewire is pretty high, in the hopes that, say, 25V * 1.5A is enough power when fed to a DC SMPS, to make application power to run a hard drive. There are some disk enclosures for Firewire, that have a "power saver" inside, that saves up power in a capacitor or similar, so that there is enough power to spin up a hard drive motor at 3 amps for ten seconds. Bus power is wired-OR. The highest voltage wins. Some Apple computers might place 25V on the bus (as the 25V was also used to run an Apple monitor that lacked its own power source). IBM PC compatibles are more likely to use 12V supplies. If you connect an Apple computer to a PC, the bus will run at 25V. All Firewire peripherals are designed to withstand max_voltage, so for a user, you don't really care what these things are doing. You only slightly care, that Apple supports a higher power bus load. The only danger with Firewire, is the shell on the six pin connector splitting apart along the seam. And somehow, the wrong pins get connected together. People have had camcorders blown, by such faults. If you use or keep Firewire cables, always inspect them for damage, and don't use a cable if the connector end is ruined! And really, the only reason you'd want Firewire today, is for your camcorder. Using the four pin connector. The camcorders don't have the room to put a six pin connector. And nobody really wants bus power near the camcorder anyway. There are some DC isolation rules. Basically, there are TI cards with some sort of "proper" isolation (the data bus passes through capacitors or something). You could run a Firewire cable between the PC in your basement and the PC in the attic, without worrying about grounding. There are also Firewire cards with a cheaper (single chip) implementation, which would work fine if two PCs share a common power strip. If you plan an "exotic" application, do the research first... Paul Thanks Paul. This computer was built abouty 10 years ago, and apparently Firewire was more popular back then. It appears the 2 plugs on this card are 4 pin types. I was looking to free up a PCI slot, and this will be the card to remove. I now know I will never use it. I dont even own a camcorder, and if I did, it would likely be the kind that writes to an internal SD card. Until I removed this card, I never had a clue what this card was for. All I knew is that it had those funny looking plugs, which I had never seen before. It looks like Firewire was shortlived technology, which has vanished into the woodwork! This computer also has a networking card. I was going to remove that one, since I dont network my systems, but after what you posted, I know I'd be more likely to use the network card, than I would this Firewire card. |
#4
|
|||
|
|||
FireWire 400 (IEEE 1394
|
#5
|
|||
|
|||
FireWire 400 (IEEE 1394
On Sun, 22 Oct 2017 17:23:00 -0400, Paul wrote:
wrote: Thanks Paul. This computer was built abouty 10 years ago, and apparently Firewire was more popular back then. It appears the 2 plugs on this card are 4 pin types. I was looking to free up a PCI slot, and this will be the card to remove. I now know I will never use it. I dont even own a camcorder, and if I did, it would likely be the kind that writes to an internal SD card. Until I removed this card, I never had a clue what this card was for. All I knew is that it had those funny looking plugs, which I had never seen before. It looks like Firewire was shortlived technology, which has vanished into the woodwork! This computer also has a networking card. I was going to remove that one, since I dont network my systems, but after what you posted, I know I'd be more likely to use the network card, than I would this Firewire card. The Firewire has been turned off on my last couple computers. I don't have a camcorder, so no Firewire there. I have the Firewire IDE enclosures, except one shortcoming is they have a 137GB limit. Which means a 120GB IDE is the largest drive the enclosure will take. That's one of the reasons they're retired. Later silicon revisions handled larger drives. There is a company that makes Firewire silicon, and probably with an assortment of more modern interfaces. It's just the level of competition, means there isn't room for all the tech to be successful. Thunderbolt nibbles away at the high end (it's too expensive to be successful in the commodity market). ESATA didn't seem to be all that successful - my "good" computer store doesn't stock any cables for it, a sure sign of doom. USB3 is predictably popular, as it was aimed at the right market. Basically, any tech which can use the speed of a modern hard drive, is going to do well. USB3 on average, will do 200MB/sec with random purchases at the computer store. It takes additional care to get up to 450MB/sec level (I don't have the gear for it). The fastest USB3 storage to date, is a USB3.1 (double speed) SSD that transfers at 700MB/sec. My local computer store doesn't stock those either. Paul I can see that this Firewire card is just wasting space in my computer. USB2 is fast enough for me. USB1.1 is horribly slow on my 17 year old computer, but it works. But USB2 sure is a lot better on my newer computer. I dont know if I really even want USB3. I often wonder what the big rush is, to move data that fast. Some people will probably say "faster is better", but i question that. When data is transferred that fast, does it transfer accurately? I'd rather wait 30 seconds to copy a 2gb file, and know it's an accurate copy, than do it in 8 seconds and later find the file is corrupt. |
#6
|
|||
|
|||
FireWire 400 (IEEE 1394
|
#7
|
|||
|
|||
FireWire 400 (IEEE 1394
On Mon, 23 Oct 2017 15:13:27 -0400, Paul wrote:
wrote: I can see that this Firewire card is just wasting space in my computer. USB2 is fast enough for me. USB1.1 is horribly slow on my 17 year old computer, but it works. But USB2 sure is a lot better on my newer computer. I dont know if I really even want USB3. I often wonder what the big rush is, to move data that fast. Some people will probably say "faster is better", but i question that. When data is transferred that fast, does it transfer accurately? I'd rather wait 30 seconds to copy a 2gb file, and know it's an accurate copy, than do it in 8 seconds and later find the file is corrupt. When it transfers fast, you can afford to run checksums on it, to verify it was transferred accurately :-) When you install a modern version of 7ZIP, it adds some checksum commands to the right-click menu. CRC32 runs at around 1GB/sec if your disk is that fast. You can generate a quick checksum for the source and the destination file and compare them, if you're unsure. On modern high-speed buses, each packet is protected by its own CRC check. Which allows detecting and logging "in-flight" errors. The media can still become corrupted, such as "holding a magnet too close to the drive", if you get my meaning. On an SSD, a cosmic ray could flip a single bit. Both hard drives and SSDs have "error correcting codes", which work out which bit is in error, and correct it. So even that has some protections. When there are too many errors in a sector, the codes cannot handle that case. The codes are there to handle the cosmic rays and other "expected" stuff. There's lots of armoring on the new stuff. Cheap silicon makes that more feasible to do. Just like CDs have the potential for three dimensional Reed Solomon, making the CD "almost scratch resistant". In practical situations, the laser loses lock, rather than the CD feeding the user an errored sector. Like you, I occasionally run verifications on my hardware. After bad RAM on this PC, ruined a couple Macrium backups I made of the disks on this machine, I still run checks. The RAM (because it lacks ECC) is one of the weak spots in the PC. Server machines have ECC. Intel decided it was a clever idea to not have ECC on desktop - even if the desktop has 64GB of RAM. Years ago, we would never have dreamed of running with that much RAM, without ECC on it. Paul While I'm sure you know what you are talking about, I have to question the practicality of this? So you do a super fast transfer using USB3, which saves one minute or 20 minutes, depending on the size of the transferred data (versus using USB2). But then you spend an hour or two creating and running checksums. In the end, you spent a lot more time than just using a slower process. I must admit that using USB2 on my XP machine is very fast compared to USB1.1 on my 17 year old Win98 machine. I have one partition on my Win98 machine that consists of 63gb of photos and music. Doing a direct copy of that partition, to an external USB drive, literally takes about 20 hours using USB1.1. That's damn slow, but I do feel confident that the data is copied correctly at that slow speed. I start that backup before going ot bed, when I know I have somewhere to go the next day, so I wont need the computer. So, it happens on it;'s own and dont bother me. Fortunately, I store all photos in a folder named after the year, such as "2016" "2017". That saves a lot of time, because all photos in folders prior to the current year do not need to be copied again. I also put all newly added music in a folder called "New Music". That way I dont have to backup the older music again, until I decide to combine the newer stuff with the older folders, which are all named by the name of the band or performer. My other partitions are smaller and dont take near as long to backup. I have however learned a new trick. I can take the drives from that slow machine, connect a USB connector and power supply to them, and copy them using my faster XP machine. I do however wonder if using USB2 is as accurate, and since I have to physically change cables and all of that, I usually just use the USB1.1 and let it run slow. |
#8
|
|||
|
|||
FireWire 400 (IEEE 1394
|
#9
|
|||
|
|||
FireWire 400 (IEEE 1394
On Tue, 24 Oct 2017 04:33:35 -0400, Paul wrote:
wrote: While I'm sure you know what you are talking about, I have to question the practicality of this? So you do a super fast transfer using USB3, which saves one minute or 20 minutes, depending on the size of the transferred data (versus using USB2). But then you spend an hour or two creating and running checksums. In the end, you spent a lot more time than just using a slower process. I must admit that using USB2 on my XP machine is very fast compared to USB1.1 on my 17 year old Win98 machine. I have one partition on my Win98 machine that consists of 63gb of photos and music. Doing a direct copy of that partition, to an external USB drive, literally takes about 20 hours using USB1.1. That's damn slow, but I do feel confident that the data is copied correctly at that slow speed. I start that backup before going ot bed, when I know I have somewhere to go the next day, so I wont need the computer. So, it happens on it;'s own and dont bother me. Fortunately, I store all photos in a folder named after the year, such as "2016" "2017". That saves a lot of time, because all photos in folders prior to the current year do not need to be copied again. I also put all newly added music in a folder called "New Music". That way I dont have to backup the older music again, until I decide to combine the newer stuff with the older folders, which are all named by the name of the band or performer. My other partitions are smaller and dont take near as long to backup. I have however learned a new trick. I can take the drives from that slow machine, connect a USB connector and power supply to them, and copy them using my faster XP machine. I do however wonder if using USB2 is as accurate, and since I have to physically change cables and all of that, I usually just use the USB1.1 and let it run slow. Something you don't realize - the noise floor on computer buses and communications channels, has gradually been improving over the years. The higher speed interconnect can be *more* reliable - looking at the ugly waveforms on the slow buses would show you why this is. One of the reasons the 40 wire IDE cable was limited to 33MHz, is the signaling was "close to broken". If they'd pushed it much higher, it would have been unusable. If you looked at the waveforms with a scope, you'd be going "THATs my data ?!?". It looks really bad. You would be asking, how can the computer chip look at that horrible waveform, and decide what level is a 1 and what level is a 0. Some of the replacement point to point interconnect (like SATA or PCI Express or USB3), the waveforms look really nice. The interconnect is "ideal". You inject a trapezoidal signal into one end of the line, and it comes out the other end exactly as it should. It's no longer "wavey gravy" like the old buses. IDE was wavey. PCI was wavey. And USB 1.1 would have been pretty bad too. But because the rate on USB 1.1 is turned down on purpose (it doesn't run that fast), it has time to settle. Paul Ok, in that case, I guess I'm doing well on my old hardware. But you brought up a question. I still have a 40 wire cable to my hard drives. It came with the computer. If I change that to an 80 wire, will anything improve? Or dont it matter for a 17 year old computer? I know all the extra wires are nothing but ground wires. I can only assume they prevent signal crossover by capacitance between the wires (is that correct, or is there some other reason for them)? I cant see any other reason for 40 ground wires..... |
#10
|
|||
|
|||
FireWire 400 (IEEE 1394
|
|
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
IEEE 1394 | [email protected] | General | 0 | April 24th 05 09:06 PM |
IEEE 1394 | [email protected] | General | 0 | April 23rd 05 09:54 AM |
IEEE 1394 problem | Skjoldmø | Homebuilt PC's | 2 | January 28th 04 06:57 AM |
firmware for external firewire (IEEE-1394 911) hdd case | T.G. | Homebuilt PC's | 0 | January 1st 04 01:52 PM |
IEEE-488 (GPIB) and IEEE-1394 (FireWire) | Some One | General | 1 | August 10th 03 09:31 PM |