Posted 01/09/2009 at 08:48:12am

They probably compared eSATA to USB b/c many external HDD's have one or both types of ports.  Like it or not, firewire+USB both compete against eSATA for market-share, when it comes to many devices and the choice of which of these 3 types of port(s) to incorporate.

Your figure of 33% (real-world vs. nominal speed) is not "optimistic" for USB 2.0... many USB devices reach 50% of USB 2.0's nominal speed and that's where it starts getting "optimistic".  And, USB is anywhere from only 16% slower than firewire 1394a, to a significant 70% slower, depending on whether reading or writing, and whether using lots of small files or vice-versa (www.usb-ware.com/firewire-vs-usb.htm" mce_href="http://www.usb-ware.com/firewire-vs-usb.htm) so depending on what your primary uses are, firewire can be as little as 16% more "craptacular" than USB...but yes, it has significant speed advantages over usb SOME of the time... but even that does not negate the reasons I give below for why firewire sucks despite its speed advantage.

Gigabit ethernet is widely known to reach only 33%-66% of its stated speed (wikipedia's article links to real-world testing).  The internal speed of most SATA HDD's is also 1/3 or less of the "nominal" speed. So USB 2.0 is not alone in having real-world performance that much slower than their "nominal" performance.

So long as people inform themselves of real-world instead of "nominal" perfomance, there's no "flawed reality": Even once informed that Firewire is faster, the reasons NOT to use firewire are too compelling.  The reason I personally don't use firewire is this:

the only firewire flash-drives I've ever seen are $100 for a pitiful 2GB... and for larger capacities than a flash-drive --namely external HDD's-- I do find faster file-transfers to be VERY necessary, so I use eSATA b/c both firewire and USB are slower than many external HDD's (and even 800mbps firewire is slower than eSATA...and costs way more)... I can't find any cellphones that use firewire... I have no reason to look for firewire ports on a MoBo or any other hardware, until peripheral manufacturers and Apple itself give me a reason.

Firewire is like Apple got a great caterer, best champagne, and great band for a party... i.e. in and of itself, it has potential to rock, and it puts USB 2.0 to shame... but the problem is that firewire's party is LAME cos Apple forgot to (a) invite everyone to the "party" (get manufacturers to make devices that can slide into their "party"... First they scared off consumers with too many reliability issues that Apple took too long to fix, and they scared vendors (peripheral-makers) off with hard-to-control RFI issues, and they allowed Sony+others to make iLink devices which didn't work on most Wintel PC's, only Apple: this confused and alienated consumers even further than the hardware breaking.  They've had some success with SCSI, at least, but that's still far from what they need to steal the show back from USB 2.0-3.0).

(b) then they charged too much for "admission"

and (c) the timing for their "party" was all wrong (they scheduled it in the city that was hosting the "superbowl" on the same date as the "superbowl" --and didn't provide a big-screen TV-- and their timing was such that people went to USB 2.0's "superbowl" party and drank beer instead of firewire's "champange" ...cos at least USB 2.0 has EVERYTHING like flash-drives [akin to having "big-screen TV's"] ;-) , and at reasonable prices).  Or let's just say...

Apple needs to get others in the computer industry behind them (or failing that, produce firewire peripherals themselves) and do it for competitive prices: give people more performance for the same cost, otherwise they won't gain back market-share from a virtual-monopoly like USB; they blew it and failed to do this with firewire-800 (1394b), and thereby made many people fail to forgive-and-forget that their early versions of firewire-400 ports BLEW UP and supprted so few devices.  When you consider all of the above:

It's amazing that Apple is still even bothering to invest in the design+manufacture of faster firewire ports, without securing widespread industry support that can manufacture more peripherals to fit INTO those oh-so-superior -- yet oh-so-useless -- 800/1600/3200 firewire ports. ("useless" cos an 800mbps port that goes unfilled...that's like a battleship that never leaves the harbor.) "If you build it, they (owners of non-Apple PC's) WON'T come" ...not when so few peripherals are manufactured to FILL the firewire ports.

Posted 01/09/2009 at 06:33:26am

Amounts of CPU time eSATA vs. USB vs. firewire each require:

http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/19/kangurus-new-e-flash-thumbdrive-marries-esata-and-usb/

 or http://eshop.macsales.com/NewsRoom/Framework.cfm?page=articles/article_extre_hdmerc.html

...just samples from 2 sources.

Posted 01/09/2009 at 04:59:02am

Well first, yes you are off by a decimal (0.24, not 2.4).  But even if you write data to every last GB on the drive and the next day, you rewrite data to cover the whole drive again, ad infinitum, Sandisk's given figure should mean it lasts nearly 2 years...not bad for such a severe workload.  However...

Second issue here is that for the figures given --whether for HDD's or SSD's-- most of the first few articles that comes upin a google for HDD + MTBF ...are enlightening.  Basically what each manufacturer claims can be about as accurate as saying "This Samsung TV is rated for 10,0001 dynamic contrast (DC) and the competitor is only rated for 3,000:1 DC, so the Samsung must have better picture-quality". :-)

Posted 01/09/2009 at 04:06:02am

EMC says in 24 months, SSD's will only be as cheap as special fiber-channel disks (Check pricewatch.com for prices of "fiber channel" HDD's: the decent (and not "pre-owned") fiber-channel ones cost 5 times more $-per-gigabyte than a standard 7200-RPM disk): http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/24/179242

Ahm, I'll be sticking with RAID'ing 7200-RPM drives together (to be faster than 3G SSD's @ less $-per-GB... even 24 months from today, they wil be that expensive) until SSD's get more cost-competitive.  I use

RAID-0 for OS+program files+swap

and RAID-1 or -10 for any user-files that I can't afford to lose + my boot-sector. (RAID-1 gets read fast, but has slower writes than RAID-0.),

with a 'mirror' (including boot sector) of OS+program files stored on a USB-flash drive.

Only problem with the 100-year lifespan they tout for SSD's is that it's nearly worthless b/c only 25 years from now, we'll probably look upon their largest 3G drive (the 250GB one) as I look upon the "huge" 20MB HDD that came with my first PC that I bought 23 years ago (and that was the BIGGEST option offered by the company, PC Limited, which changed their name to 'Dell'.  Anyone heard of them?? ;-) )