You don't hear a whole lot about FireWire anymore, which has been largely overshadowed by USB. But FireWire is still popular in the digital video field, helping the interface reach the two billion ports milestone in 2010, the 1394 Trade Association announced.

"The two billion ports represents a significant new milestone for 1394," said Max Bassler, chairman, 1394 Trade Association. "Just as impressive is the innovative and creative application of FireWire in new generations of advanced industrial automation, vision systems, and production equipment."

Bassler said he expects the FireWire spec to "continue its steady, stable growth during 2011" as the first products begin to roll out operating at 1.6Gb/s.

Show of hands, who's still using FireWire?

Sans Digital this week unveiled a new set of flexible 4-bay storage solutions sporting Firewire interfaces in both portable tower and enterprise rackmount formats. These include the TowerSTOR TS4CT and EliteRAID ER104CT, both of which come with embedded hardware RAID, Firewire 400 and 800 ports, eSATA, and of course USB 2.0 interfaces.

In the company's press release, Sans Digital heavily touts the embedded RAID solution, which the company says "eliminates operating system compatibility issues, where no driver is needed." It also allows for up to 200MB/s performance, supports up to 8TB of storage space, and supports RAID modes 0, 1, 0+1, 3, and 5.

With all those hard drives, things can get pretty toasty. On that front, Sans Digital has equipped the 4-bay units with automatic cooling fans that turn on when a certain temperature is reached.

The TS4CT and ER104CT will sell for $400 and $500, respectively. 

Forget about sliced bread; USB might be the single greatest invention ever. Just don't tell the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (now just called IEEE), who recently approved a new 1394-2008 specification that supports bumping the bandwidth up to 3.2 Gb/s.

"The new standard includes all of the amendments, enhancements, and more than 100 errata which have been added to the base standard over the last 12 years," said Les Baxter, chair of the working group which developed the standard. "This update provides developers with a single document they can rely upon for al of their application needs."

Firewire has fallen in recent years from the high speed interface of choice, particularly for DV transfers, to one that is now used mainly in professional environments. But that could change with the new spec, which introduces support for S1600 (1.6 Gb/s) and S3200 (3.2 Gb/s) while also being backwards compatible with current S400 and S800 ports. And the IEEE isn't finished, as looking ahead it's expected that Firewire will scale to 6.4 Gb/s.

For its part, USB isn't remaining idle and will receive an upgrade to 4.8 Gb/s in version 3.0, though exactly when still remains unknown.