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FireWire2Go-Go: Putting Fire into
the 'Book
by Remy Davison
Got a Pismo? Titanium? Or the latest iBook? Then you're already lucky enough to
have on-board FireWire ready to rock 'n' roll. But if you're like me, and have a
Lombard or a Wallstreet just sitting around doing nothing, you're still in luck.
Better still, if you have a Kanga G3, a 3400 or a 2400, you can still hop on the
FireWire bus. All you need is a $99 trip to MCE
and your old PCMCIA slots will be magically converted to CardBus. And that means
FireWire - and USB for that matter - cards will work with your 'Book. Unfortunately,
you're out of luck if you own a first-generation iBook. And, no, you can't swap in
a new iBook logic board. Sorry. Doesn't fit. But virtually all the iMacs and every
Blue & White G3 and G4 have FireWire ports. PCI Power Mac owners aren't left
out in the cold either; PCI FireWire and USB/FireWire cards are widely available.
But to everyone else, welcome to the world of FireWire (or IEEE-1394 = same thing).
If you've yet to discover what FireWire is, Apple has a page here.
Although if you keep reading all the way to the end of the page, you may learn lots
more. FireWire is not an Apple-only technology, although Apple developed it. Sony
calls their version 'iLink', for instance. iLink is not identical to FireWire; it
uses a different connector, for example, and it won't power devices off the bus.
But it is FireWire compatible. As is everything with IEEE-1394 on the box.
So what is FireWire? Essentially, it's an exceptionally fast form of serial connectivity.
Up to 400mbps in fact, which is 50 megabytes per second in the old money. Only very
fast, wide SCSI can beat that. And not on price. USB 2, the latest intel development
of the USB specification, has yet to prove its pudding, to coin a phrase, although
it's notionally meant to run at 480mbps (does anyone else thing '480' was picked
as a figure because it happened to be more than 400?). However, FireWire is expected
to reach speeds upwards of 700mbps in the nearish future.
A lot of hardware developers have committed to FireWire. Already, a large number
of scanners, printers, hard drives and removable storage have adopted a FireWire
interface. By far the biggest growth area in FireWire peripherals are digital video
(DV) cameras and, of course, CD burners. Virtually all major brands now have CDRWs
in FireWire casings available. It may entirely replace SCSI in the near future. And
if it doesn't, USB 2 probably will.
FireWire's greatest advantages don't just include speed; FireWire is also hot-pluggable,
meaning you don't have to shutdown or even sleep your Mac before plugging in peripherals.
Better still, you get access to much cheaper storage devices, provided you have the
FireWire ports and the enclosure at hand. IDE/ATA/ATAPI devices, standard in the
PC world, have been gradually adopted across the Mac range since 1993 (the PowerBook
150). IDE, previously the poor cousin to SCSI, has narrowed the speed gap considerably
in recent years and is a great deal cheaper. 45 to 75GB IDE hard drives can be had
relatively cheaply these days, particularly when you consider the cost of large SCSI
drives. And SCSI, limited to, at most, 14 devices on a dual-SCSI bus (okay, okay,
so Adaptec claims you can plug 30 devices into its PCI SCSI card, but I've never
actually seen it done), is a country mile behind FireWire's 63 device limit.
And forget all that old SCSI voodoo like termination and ID jumper settings; FireWire
requires no termination or ID setting. Everyone in the house impressed yet?
So why am I talking about IDE here? Because all those IDE/ATA/ATAPI devices - like
hard drives, CDRWs and DVD-ROMs - can be placed inside a FireWire enclosure, giving
you an exceptionally wide range of product choices. Moreover, you'll also find removable
drives, like the Jaz, Zip and Orb with FireWire interfaces. More FireWire scanners
are appearing, although at the high-end right now. But that'll change fairly rapidly.
I've even come across some FireWire inkjets lately - again, at the higher end of
the market.
Why would I want to do this?
Good question. Cost is one reason. Although there's a bit of capital investment
involved in acquiring a FireWire setup, it's a lot more future-proof. Still got that
250MB SCSI hard drive you paid a fortune for in 1990? Not much use today. And that
Mac you have wrapped around it would be lucky to fetch $10 at the flea market, right?
The difference is that your FireWire enclosure will have a long and useful life.
Even if the (gasp) 45GB hard drive you buy today is too tiny in 2004, you can simply
slot in one of those cheap 150GB drives that'll doubtless be run-of-the-mill in 36
ticks of the calendar. Ditto for when your trusty SCSI CD burner grinds to a noisy
and smoky death. Mind you, by then, we'll probably all be using DVD-R for recording
gigabytes of data. So long as you bought a 5.25" FireWire case, you'll be future-proofed
against obsolescence in that department as well.
We Now Interrupt This Column To Go To MacWorld San Francisco...
Right. And we're back. Where were we? Okay. Virtually all CardBus FireWire cards
work with PowerBooks. I got my Newer (RIP) FireWire2Go card for my PowerBook at Outpost.com for a mere $US35. Not too shabby. However,
you have a wide choice of cards from Macally,
VST or Ratoc,
among many others. Ratoc, for example, claims that their card works with all
G3 PowerBooks, but I'd ascertain compatibility prior to purchase if you own an original
G3 Kanga. Check their feature list before you plunk down the dough though; some cards
are 'generic' FireWire, meaning you can connect peripherals. But the name brand cards
all do digital video and MPEG, which many generic cards do not support. It's also
recommended that you have a 300MHz-plus CPU for digital video work. Slower PowerBooks
and Power Macs will work, but you run the risk of dropping frames. Testing the Newer
FireWire card with a 233MHz Wallstreet demonstrated that data transfers worked just
fine though. However, I'm getting way ahead of myself here.
Are We Having Fun Yet?
The Pismo and iBook FireWire ports are powered. Provided the device on each port
doesn't use more than about 5 watts, they can be self-powered. However, if you plan
on chaining multiple devices together, you'll need a powered FireWire repeater if
you're using unpowered devices, which is like an ethernet or USB hub, only it's for
FireWire. These aren't as cheap as 10baseT or USB hubs (which are dirt cheap), but
they're rapidly decreasing in price. Note, however, that a lot of external FireWire
devices comes with their own power supply. For cables, you'll need a standard 4-pin-to-4-pin
for external hard drives and CDRWs and most likely a 4-pin-to-6-pin for most DV cameras.
What's Available?
Virtually everything. At time of writing, FireWire bridging devices are now available
for Iomega's Zip and Jaz. I noticed Iomegaware's latest release dumped a slew of
USB extensions into my Extensions folder, none of which I need, along with a solitary
FireWire support driver. FireWire-to-SCSI bridges are just appearing on the market,
courtesy of BridgeIt,
although these will doubtless remain more expensive than FireWire/ATA enclosures.
Nevertheless, the ugly business of SCSI termination and the no-no of hot-plugging
SCSI devices will most likely become a thing of the past. So don't throw away you're
shiny new Jaz or Orb SCSI device - you'll probably be able to bridge it with BridgeIt
(a pun, in best Shakespearian tradition) or use Iomega's FireWire adapter. Or something.
Firms such as New Motion offer relatively
inexpensive FireWire enclosures in 2.5", 3.5" and 5.25" sizes, supporting
MO, CDRW and DVD-RAM drives, as well as hard discs. Other places that carry a large
number of products are FireWire
Depot and FireWire Direct. The cheapest
5.25" Firewire enclosure I've found so far (in the US) is at Alien
Outpost for $US99. The average 3.5" casing is about $139, with 2.5"
drive enclosures generally going for about $10 less. Some, like Sarotech's,
have a USB port, as well as two FireWire connectors. So you can use it with a USB
machine (like a PC) if FireWire isn't available on the motherboard (like a PC). Most,
if not all, come with an internal AC power supply, so they don't presuppose whatever
you're hanging it off is bus powered. That's good if, like me, you own a Newer FireWire
CardBus card. Conversely, the Ratoc card permits an AC power cord running off the
dongle. The reason is that CardBus cards can't be powered via the PCMCIA slot because
they'd overheat. If you own a Pismo, or you're waiting on a Titanium PowerBook, you
needn't worry about powering the external device, provided its power draw is fairly
low and you only hang one device off each port.
Will I really get 400mbps?
Probably not. FireWire auto-senses the speed of the device it's connected with,
and endeavours to send/receive data at maximum throughput (100, 200 or 400mbps).
However, all the FireWire-to-ATA devices I've come across so far, while complying
with the ATA-4 standard, max out with an ATA-66 hard drive installed. You can use
an ATA-100 drive, but you won't get the full benefit of the speed. You're better
off opting for an ATA-66 drive running at 7,200rpm or better, rather than an ATA-100
5,400rpm drive. However, you will easily get 12MBps from a decent IDE hard drive
which is around three times the speed necessary for DV streams. Although 50MBps (400mbps)
is the theoretical maxima of FireWire, some people have reported consistent and reliable
22-29MBps with high-speed hard drives. Now that's fast. On average though, user reports
seem to indicate that 12MBps write and 20MBps reading times are about the median.
Better still, some tests I saw suggest FireWire gets better throughput on Macs than
on PCs; on 450-500MHz MP G4s, motherboard FireWire was getting up to 39MBps. The
fastest 1+ GHz PCs were getting maybe 29-36MBps tops. I suspect there's a possible
slowdown on the PC side due to having to travel through the relatively slow PCI bus.
While Macs of course are PCI as well, I'm not sure that FireWire is routed through
the PCI bus the way, say, a PCI FireWire card has to. Something to do with a 64-bit
versus a 32-bit data bus? Who knows? So don't quiz me on this; I'm digging a mighty
big tech hole for myself that I have no way of getting out of.
Having said that, if USB 2's real-world throughput gets within 75% of 480mbps, I'll
eat a trough full of 386 chips.
Support
Some FireWire hard drives should simply show up on the desktop and can be initialised
and formatted at will. Unfortunately, both Apple's Disk Copy and Aladdin's ShrinkWrap
only support 2.0GB file sizes (a limit of the file system), which means that you
can't mount a huge 30GB disk image on the FireWire drive. But then again, FireWire
drives are fast enough not to require the safety margin offered by disk images. FWB's Hard Disk Toolkit 4.0 offers generic support
for most FireWire drives; specific support will be offered in an updated version
shortly, I'm told. Conversely, Radialogic
offers Storage Master, which supports not only FireWire drives, but optical drives
(CD ROM etc.), SCSI, IDE/ATA and USB drives. Another Firewire-specific driver application
is Heat Utilities which offers formatting,
partitioning, defragmentation and disc protection. Windows 98 SE is supposed to support
FireWire out of the box, but I have no idea why I'm discussing that here. Suffice
to say that if it's Windows, it probably doesn't work without a $3 per minute call
to your friendly tech $upport person.But to be fair, the advantage of FireWire is
its platform independence. A CardBus FireWire card simply needs the correct driver
and will work just as well in either a Mac or PC portable; unlike PCI SCSI, video,
IDE and FireWire cards, you don't need to alter the firmware to get compatibility.
This also means that FireWire hard drives and CDRW will be readily cross-platform,
much as USB printers and scanners can be.
Orange Micro and others have recently announced
Firewire web cams, although I'm not sure I see the advantage over USB. Orange Micro's
iBOT is a desktop video camera at more-or-less USB prices and delivers much better
frames-per-second (fps) than a USB-based camera (up to 30fps). Some high-end scanners
already come with FireWire and this trend will become more and more pronounced as
it's much faster than USB, and I suspect it'll take some time before USB 2 devices
trickle onto the market. Given that PC peripheral manufacturers have so much invested
and locked up in the very cheap USB 1 technology, I suspect there's little incentive
to go either FireWire or USB 2 in the low-end scanner or printer market where margins
are very thin.
The reverse applies to the CDRW market. Both Mac and PC owners can get multiport
FireWire PCI cards for their desktops (if the Mac's a beige G3 or earlier) for under
$US100. Belkin and many others manufacture these. For CDRW manufacturers, FireWire
overcomes the internal-only installation of IDE drives (together with an awful lot
of mucking about with master/slave/secondary master configurations on the PC - and
sometimes the Mac) and eliminates the need for both SCSI and (lots of laughter) parallel
port CDRWs. Burners instantly become super-smooth, hot-swappable gadgets, incredibly
convenient for fast backups, especially if they're of the 12x or 16x variety. Plug
it in - switch it on - back up - pull it out. You're done. And it's most obvious
convenience is to PowerBook or notebook owners. Adaptec's Toast (both OEM and Deluxe)
and Jam support FireWire CDRWs through Toast's FireWire extension. Again, you have
options here: you can simply purchase an external FireWire CDRW or buy a 5.25"
FireWire enclosure and dump the IDE CDRW of your choice into it.
In this department, VST offer a lot of devices.
Portables CDRWs, CardBus and tiny hard drives abound. These peripherals aren't exactly
inexpensive right now, but the cost is rapidly coming down, as evidenced by the fall
in the price of CardBus FireWire cards and enclosures over the last twelve months.
Put it this way: the Newer card would have cost me $AUD470 ($US235) a year ago; now
I get it for $200 less. You'll find a number of PC cards in the $70-130 range, variously
offering one or two ports. As most FireWire devices have two ports, you needn't worry
too much about having only one. Speaking of which, the mono-ported Titanium PowerBook
is going to need external devices like these - because that's the only choice you've
got for writable, removable storage.
Should you go for an off-the-shelf FireWire external drive? Or build your own with
an enclosure and your own hard drive? The economics of the equation suggest the latter
option. While new users might appreciate the simplicity of plug and play with nothing
else to think about, installing an IDE drive into a case takes about 30 seconds and
it's something an amateur can easily do. Moreover, you pay a lot for a comparatively
small 20 or 30GB device when you can get your own cheap enclosure(s) and buy a relatively
inexpensive 40, 60 or 80GB IDE drive running at 7,200rpm (most OEM FireWire drives,
I note, run at 5,400). Most of the cases I've looked at come with FireWire cable,
their own power supply and Mac/PC driver software.
So hop on the FireWire bus. You're unlikely to regret it and you'll appreciate the
sheer speed and convenience. It gives you access to an ever-increasing range of peripherals
and, as Apple owns, develops and drives the technology, Mac compatibility is assured
as third-party manufacturers essentially have to duplicate Apple's technological
advances.
Besides, if you stack up those colorful FireWire enclosures next your iBook or iMac,
they look incredibly cool.
A Quick Note on the New PowerBooks
Some of you may have noticed I left the room to watch some poor-quality streaming
video for an hour or so. I'll blame it on the 56k connection and the fact that I
live almost as far from San Francisco as it's possible to get. The new Titanium PowerBook
G4s introduced at MWSF this month look the goods. I'll do a follow up on this when
I've actually had the chance to use one (unlike some of our esteemed colleagues
on the web). But briefly:
- Is good: 15.2" wide screen display
- Is good: G4 CPU
- Is good: 6 ounces lighter
- Is bad: no expansion bays whatsoever
- Is bad: no simultaneous twin batteries
- Is bad: only one FireWire port
- Is bad: no standard sound-in port
A quick scouring of the Mac web suggests most people are pretty happy with the
TiBook. Hope they put their wallets where their words are though.
Because Apple needs Titanium fighting in the pro portable market like a Titan. Not
going down like the Titanic. Doesn't it?
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