• Uninvited Guest@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    4 months ago

    I remember having a FireWire in one of the family desktops when I was a kid. Can’t remember what we might have used it for, though.

    It resides in the same vague memory hole as the Zip drive that we had.

    • Aniki 🌱🌿@lemmings.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      4 months ago

      Firewire was phenomenal for external hard drives. The speed was almost as fast as the drives so you were rarely limited by the port.

      • Telorand@reddthat.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        4 months ago

        Yep, that’s because the actual data transfer was handled by the more capable device, instead of only the guest. I think the standard also required a minimum throughput, iirc, whereas USB only had a maximum.

    • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      edit-2
      4 months ago

      Firewire was good for high bandwidth devices like external hard drives and video cameras because it didn’t require the CPU to do any heavy lifting. These days USB is mature enough and CPUs are so fast that we (mostly) don’t notice any performance impact but in the Core 2 Duo days you could easily max out one of your two cores with a large file transfer over USB.

    • Crashumbc@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      4 months ago

      Yeah, the ZIP drive was just starting to take off when the Internet killed needing a sneaker net (at least of that size). Add in CD-ROM drives which you needed anyway. And good night.

    • JeffKerman1999@sopuli.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      4 months ago

      I had a FireWire hard drive! I remember I bought specifically the enclosure that supported both standards since my motherboard had a FireWire port and on paper it was faster than usb! Too bad the HDD was as slow as molasses