Thank you for your informative reply on firewire. I was trying to decide if it was worth the extra money to buy the G3 with the 9 Gbt Ultra2 SCSI. I didn't want to wait until the middle of February for it which is when I was told I would get it and thought that the firewire or Ultra ATA might do just as well, but I guess I'll wait.
I wouldn't spend the money on the Ultra2 SCSI. Despite higher theoretical performance, in real-world tests you are unlikely to get significant differences between Ultra2 SCSI and the Ultra ATA, especially if you have normal, bursty access.
Most users run small files at random intervals, which is more governed by seek time than anything else. Unless you are trying to stream uncompressed video to disk and provide playback, I doubt it's worth the money. Latency is the problem, not bandwidth.
As for Firewire, once again, 400Mbps is faster than all but the latest Ultra2 SCSI, which is only available usually internally.
Most people attaching peripheral drives have been using SCSI2, and that is much slower. Firewire will be a big step up for them. If people feel the need to buy Firewire to SCSI converters, they will likely see big improvements in performance over their old SCSI2 interface for external drives.
Firewire will quickly scale up to 800Mbps and 1600 Mbps. With hot-swapping and chaining, it is just better.
Just my opinion, as usual. |
