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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
I was also surprised about getting plain old R5 working on a SATA drive (took a few months fiddling though), am I the only one?. FWIW it is on a cheapo PCChips A31G socket 754 with an included 2800 Barton? for about $70 awhile back.
When SATA was first touted by Intel it was promised as an upgrade to PATA that wouldn't need OS changes and just work as is. That didn't pan out when I first tried it. Still never got W2K booting on an Intel mobo with SATA boot drive. I don't expect R5 to just work on other SATA boards, I got lucky the compatibility was okay. Another bonus was my best case transfer rate went from 5MBs to around 30MBs similar to W2K for large files, that was a real unexpected bonus.
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.
Actually, the main reason AFAIK why firewire is more expensive is because Apple charges hardware manufacturers relatively exorbitant licensing fees for each firewire port used on a device. USB has prevailed because Intel chose not to charge excessive licensing fees for it & it is a fairly open standard to implement. Though yes, firewire hardware is a bit more expensive to manufacture as well, so the expense has been compounded, hence its unpopularity with manufacturers.






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.