Ah, happy days. SCSI conflicts, whether or not to use a terminator and where. Boy, do I not miss that!

I don't have any Firewire peripherals, I do have USB ones though.
For me, it's what gets the job done in a good performance:price ratio...

No need to take it personally. Firewire on a PC was always slower than on a Mac. USB was faster on a PC than on a Mac. When Apple dropped Firewire in mainstream models the speed of the USB magically doubled. That is a fact not my personal opinion.

I had a Power Mac in the late 90's which looked like this :

http://images.craigslist.org/3m13ob3p0Z ... 301e22.jpg

It had a 2gb SCSI Seagate drive and SCSI CD drive and SCSI Zip Drive. After that time, progressively the speed of SCSI went through the roof, I don't see how firewire was ever a replacment.

When you say for video do you mean cameras ?

Yep, my USB 2 drive was happily delivering 35-40Mb/s on my aging Athlon 64 machine, then I bought a first gen iMac 24" and it magically reduced its performance to 12MB/s on that machine!

It was quicker to copy the data over the lan to the Windows machine and to the USB 2 device than to copy it locally...

No doubt Big_D. The good news is on my 2009 Macbook the speed is about 32-33 so its back up to where it should be.

I'm not, don't worry. I'm well aware that USB2 on older Mac models sucked.

I'm old skool. USB for input devices, something more beefy for hard drives and stuff.

My experience of Firewire is, often its like handling live snakes, very fond of blowing the ports up on motherboards and similar, even when connected powered down.

I must be gifted then, because I have never ever had a problem in 9 or more years of using FW. USB, on the other hand... and don't get me started on those Black Arts of SCSI again!

Apart from being much, much simpler to use - hot swappable, no more termination issues, smaller ports, faster, networkable, no ID assignments or conflicts, bus powered, longer cable runs.
Yes, the advantages are lost on me...



Well that's a part of it, but also for capturing from decks, handling video to and from drives - if you're on a Mac, then FW still maintains a better constant throughput of data. eSata is better still. Used to regularly be shuffling gigabytes of video around for various things for work.

USB 2 has it's place, but it's not a replacement for what FW offers, IMHO.

Firewire is quicker than SCSI ?

Not SCSI of the past ten years no.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI

*sigh*
FW800 will go to 3200 M/Bits over a 100 metre cable.
Show me the SCSI interface that can match that.
SCSI was a PITA from day one, FW is more versatile.
SCSI is great for fast data transfer over short distances on devices you're not wanting to connect/disconnect on a regular basis. Like server hard drives.

SCSI is by no measure a good external interface any more.

e-sata ftw

Now all I need is an e-sata port......

Prof, first of all you start rambling on about video, next you are talking about external interface only. You said Firewire is quicker, I said no its not. If you want to go off on a giant tangent then we could debate if toast is better than crumpets.

http://www.barefeats.com/hard35.html

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=7302

(that's an old one just for you)

Sorry, did I lose you?
What does SCSI have to offer over FW then?
Why did we turn our backs on it as a popular external connection?




Cool, I stand corrected. My last exposure to SCSI was an internal RAID card in an old G3. Haven't had the need for it since.