Firewire 800 Speed increasing to 3.2Gb

Jim Brennan

VHS Member Old Skool
Just reading this on the Denver FCP User Group site.

New S3200 specification delivers higher speed than competing technologies - and much sooner - with no changes to connectors or cables

Dallas, Dec. 12, 2007 — The 1394 Trade Association today announced a new specification to quadruple the speed of FireWire to reach 3.2 gigabits per second.

The new electrical specification, known as S3200, builds upon the IEEE 1394b standard, preserving all the advantages of FireWire while offering a major and unprecedented boost in performance. The new speed uses the cables and connectors already deployed for FireWire 800 products, making the transition forward easy and convenient for 1394 product vendors and their customers. Because the 1394 arbitration, data, and service protocols were not modified for S3200, silicon and software vendors can deploy the faster speed FireWire quickly and with confidence that it will deliver its full potential performance. The S3200 specification is expected to be ratified by early February.

FireWire 800 products deployed since 2003 have proven that IEEE 1394b delivers outstanding performance. Operating without polling, without idle times, and without continuous software management, FireWire 800 efficiently delivers more than 97 percent of its bit rate as payload — not overhead. FireWire 800 hard drives today can easily move over 90 megabytes per second. S3200 preserves 100 percent of the 1394b design efficiency and will deliver extremely high payload speeds reaching nearly 400 megabytes per second. Other interface technologies struggle to deliver half their advertised bit rate to the user, even under optimal conditions.
 
is there even a HDD that canspin fast enough to lay out that much data?

Yes if you move away from HDD to SSD (Solid State Disk), I've been thinking about SSD since the first day I got my USB drive, and thought why the move has not been made earlier, my prediction is that within the next three years SSD will replace HDD.

Many latops nowadays have already made the switch, this makes them lighter, faster and consume much less power.

Also The HDD has been the one of the biggest bottlenecks in the modern PC!

They are faster, have no moving parts, can stand extreme shock, much more reliable etc, see the link for a primer:


http://www.storagesearch.com/bitmicro-art3.html
 
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