FireWire 800.

What's your take on Apple's announcement of FireWire 800 (i.e., FireWire 2 or IEEE 1394b)?

RSF

---

Answer

Apple's announcement of FireWire 800 has raised some questions. Simply put, FireWire 800 is more than twice the speed of FireWire and USB 2.0, and it can handle up to 100-meter cabling (FireWire is only good for up to 4.5 meters). FireWire 800 also has a new 9-pin connector (FireWire has 4-pin or 6-pin connectors), and the new PowerBooks have one of each. Belkin has FireWire 800-to-FireWire (4-pin or 6-pin) cables available through Apple's or its own Web site (www.belkin.com). FireWire 800 can connect up to 63 devices and provide or consume up to 45 W of power (USB 2.0 handles 2.5 W).

It's yet to be seen what major advantage FireWire 800 brings. LaCie, Maxtor, and Smart Disk announced FireWire 800 drives that should be available by the time you read this. Out of the box, FireWire 800 probably can't handle true HD. Apple says that the theoretical road map for FireWire 800 is that it will reach up to 1600 Mbps, then eventually go up to 3.2 Gbps.

DV50 (50 Mbps) and DVCPROHD (100 Mbps) should work fine, depending on the FireWire 800 sustained rate. The plan was for Panasonic eventually to release some kind of FireWire interface for the DVCPRO line, and this might now be a reality with the announcement of FireWire 800.

Someone may come out with a Serial ATA-to-FireWire 800 bridge for FireWire disk arrays. The first generation of Serial ATA can handle up to 1.2 Gbps (150 MBps) and hot plugging. There should be at least two more generations (up to 6 Gbps) available by 2007.

Ron Seifried

Forum Moderator

http://www.dv.com

Copyright [c] 2003 CMP Media LLC

Athleta coupon code