Two interesting bits of news from the Haiku front. First, Haiku now has basic support for FireWire, thanks to GSOC student JiSheng Zhang. You cannot connect a FireWire hard drive just yet, though. Second, Russian BeOS hacker Troeglazov Gerasim has ported Samba 3.10 to Haiku, so you can now browse your Windows shares in Haiku, as well as share files through Samba in Haiku. IsComputerOn has the details, as well as some screenshots.
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Member since:2005-07-08
In the same volumes there is no real reason why a 480MBps USB2 chipset should be any cheaper than the slightly slower (but much more efficient) 400MBps FW chipset Since the market sidelined FW to Apple and the high end video equipment, the NREs have less place to be spread around and both of those markets usually can bear higher prices anyway. Its like VHS v Betamax.
Anyway, I will now look for eSata as an FW alternative so that the drives are running at full speed over serial wire, that would be 1.5GBps or even 3GBps (raw rate). Remember FW is really very old now. I hope the Haiku team will have eSata support one day too, no idea if thats difficult, Sata already works for me on R5.
Member since:2006-01-26
Sata already works for me on R5.
You mean SATA in legacy emulation mode?
I'm not aware of any SATA support for R5...
Update:
Haiku already has more SATA support than R5 ever did (which was nil, since SATA was created after Be, Inc. went out of business) - in fact, Haiku should nearly have as much SATA support as Zeta did at this point 
Edited 2007-09-04 02:12
Member since:2005-07-11
FW is more expensive, due to the fact the interface is much more intelligent than USB. That functionality isn't utilized in smaller devices, so manufacturers have gone to cheaper USB. FW is faster because is has it's own dedicated clock wires, where USB has to embed a clock signal in it's 2 wire implementation ( the other 2 are power, ground). That means that many of the bits in the 480Mbps are used only for the clock synchronization, and your actual data throughput is much lower for USB.
FW actually allows devices to be daisy-chained, up to 63 devices, and hot-pluggable. There is FW800, and the spec actually is defined to go to 1.6gbps, but hasn't really been adopted.
Now that would be a cool Haiku screenshot... 63 FW devices.
But I think your right, eSata will prevail in the future.
Member since:
2005-07-22
Isn't that because FW is more expensive to implement?