FireWire popularity grows this year, FW 800 set to flourish in 2006
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Dec 15, 2005 at 5:22am
IEEE 1394 (better known as FireWire to Mac users) achieved a record level of “design-ins” throughout the global computer and storage peripherals markets in 2005, the 1394 Trade Association says. What’s more, the 1394b version, also known as FireWire 800, will grow significantly in the computer and storage sectors next year.
Growth for FireWire 800, with bandwidths up to 800 Megabits/second, remains steady, according to James Snider, executive director of the 1394 Trade Association. There also are increased design-ins for 1394b, which provides 800 Megabit/second bandwidth, and the “b” version of the standard is being used in a new series of new external hard drives and in computer motherboards, he adds.
“The expanding design activity reflects FireWire’s versatility as a multi-purpose technology,” Snider said in a press announcement. “One of its major benefits is that it can be used for many purposes, and competes so well with single purpose interface technologies such as serial ATA.”
Currently, FireWire400 is designed into more than 65 percent of notebooks. Estimates for 2006 reach approximately 72 percent. By the end of 2006, a total of more than 48 million 1394-equipped notebooks will have shipped, including some three million with FireWire 800 speeds. An estimated 11 million consumer desktop computers will also include FireWire connection capabilities.
Most computer motherboards now provide FireWire400, and new motherboards equipped with FireWire 800 have been announced by Intel, Gigabyte, Asustek and Foxconn during this year, Snider said. Intel will be supplying processors for Macs starting in 2006. Also, leading makers of external drive and storage products are now using FireWire 800 as a differentiator, Snider adds.
Wilbur Says:
Do not feed the Troll......^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Posted on December 15, 2005
OSX Says:
I’d love to see firewire of any kind “flourish”. With rumors that the next round of consumer products from Apple won’t include firewire, I’m not sure. I truly hope the rumors are false, but Apple did in fact drop firewire from the iPod line up. Let’s hope this isn’t a sign of things to come.
Posted on December 15, 2005
TValleau Says:
FWIW, I use FW800 both in a RAID configuration and using a Granite Digital removable-tray configuration for pretty heavy-duty video editing… completely without trouble. Thus, at least as far as external drives go, I’m a big fan of FW800.
Posted on December 15, 2005
Staplehead Says:
What’s curious about the rumored FireWire drop by Apple’s computers is the heavy use of FireWire by folks who have minDV cameras. For a PowerMac, one can always drop in an expansion card. For laptops, that’s a different story.
The fact that iPods don’t have FireWire is of little consequence. PC users are the largest iPod market and PCs generally don’t have FireWire. And on the smaller nano - you just cant put both USB and FireWire in such a tiny enclosure!
Posted on December 15, 2005
Nick Says:
Michael’s right. FireWire isn’t going anywhere fast. Read the Mac rumor sites and the’re talking about Apple phasing out FireWire 400 on PowerBooks and just leaving one 800 port. Apple already dropped FireWire support from all iPods within the last year. FireWire is eventually only going to be around to connect DV cameras.
This article is laughable after reading this White Paper by James Wiebe, founder of Wiebetech (who made some of the first exernal FireWire HDs), about the evolution of FireWire. Basically Apple screwed FW800 because of A) the bug in 10.3.0 that could cause entire FW800 volumes and B) a bug in all of the PowerMac G5 motherboards that limited speed of FireWire 800 to minimally above that of FW400 (I haven’t heard if this was fixed with the newest PowerMac revision with dual-core processors, but it existed on all PowerMac G5s before that).
Basically: SATA all the way.
Posted on December 15, 2005
Walter Jeffries Says:
Personally I prefer FW (400 or 800) over SATA. We have a great many PowerBooks and iBooks installed here as well as some iMacs. The are much more energy conservative than PowerMacs and that matters. I want the machines on 24/7. The electricity on a PM really adds up over the course of the year. Additionally the Notebook computers are portable, can be taken home for work, etc. Not so with the PM. We used to have some PMs but have dumped them in favor of PBs and iMacs. FW400 is adiquate and FW800 is great.
Posted on December 15, 2005
Jason E Says:
I will get flamed for this, but this is exactly what I meant by 1394 doing nothing about Firewire. The only time they do ANYTHING is when they here a backlash that Firewire is going nowhere. I sent an e-mail to them six months ago wondering why we never hear about Firewire anymore, and a month later, they put out a press release almost the same as this one. They are only reactionary. There is nothing new in this release about Firewire. The Mac news sites have given more press to Firewire and done more research and promotion of firewire than the trade association.
Firewire is wonderful. It is a standard that deserves a much better organization running it. Twice-annual press releases does not help a standard grow. They need to help grow it, not just talk about a few others once every six months.
Posted on December 15, 2005
John Vandenberg Says:
Firewire only used for Camcorders in the future? Huh? The entire music/recording industry is firewire...the interfaces used are almost all firewire, so if Apple dumps it like the rumors say, then an entire industry, one that is dominated by Macs will be screwed. Firewire isn’t going anywhere on macs, there will be no way to get audio into a mac (beyond a few channels at a time). PCI cards are not going to come raging back, as that cuts iMac and PowerBook users completely out. So apple drops FW from the ipods, that’s consumer-level product lines. One FW800 port on a mac is fine, as long as there is one FW port, we’re okay. There’s one buss on current 2-port macs now, so what’s the difference?
Posted on December 15, 2005
Nick Says:
I thought about it some more, and I think some people, myself included, are missing the point here. Previous comments have have been a bit binary, as in yea or nay on FW, but that’s surely not the case. FireWire is not suddenly going to disappear; there are plenty of people who rely on it every day. The point here is that it’s very ironic for the 1394 trade association to be putting out this report.
Their claims of FireWire 800 growth is the most dubious. The problem here is that sadly, the rollout of FireWire 800 has been plagued by problems. I mentioned two in my previous post (the 10.3.0 data erasing and the G5 speed bottleneck). Another one that affects Windows users is that the FireWire drivers distributed with XP SP2 actually limit FW 800 speeds to 100 Mbps, well below the theoretical max of 800 Mbps as well as the max speeds of USB 2.0 and FireWire 400.
I’m not in the music industry but I looked around the net for FireWire 800 audio interface and found a few (the link above is the manufacture’s page), but I found that many also support FireWire 400 and/or USB 2.0. Furthermore, as far as I know, DV cameras, including HD ones, all use FireWire 400. (Can anyone point me to other devices that need or at least benefit from FireWire 800?)
So I, as I see it, there is very little market left for FireWire 800. It uses seems to be limited to connecting high performance drives to to the PowerBooks (until we get those powered SATA ports I’m dreaming of) and select audio interface uses. In every other situation it seems that FireWire 400, USB 2.0, or SATA would do the job cheaper (FireWire 800 is by far the most expensive I/O interface). If I/O speed rather than cost is an issue then it seems as if SATA would fit the bill since it is both faster and cheaper than FireWire 800.
So as for the dream of a plethora of new FireWire 800 devices, I’m quite skeptical. Perhaps there will be growth compared to the number of 800 devices last year, but it seems that other kinds of I/O are destined to be much more commonly used.
Feel free to poke some hole in my argument here though: I’d like to see more FireWire devices around since I consider it much superior to USB 2.0 for that actually uses USB 2.0/FW 400 or greater level speeds. I just have trouble see this happening with the limited/bungled support from both Apple & Microsoft.
Posted on December 15, 2005
Nick Says:
Whoops messed up that link about SP2 limiting FireWire 800 speeds, it should be: http://www.rme-audio.com/english/techinfo/fw800sp2.htm
Posted on December 15, 2005
Luke Says:
FW800 supports fiber- optic connectors, which would bring the max speed to over 2GB/sec. I’m pretty sure it’s the only common interface standard that supports that degree of expandability. We just need some cheap fiber hardware to create the demand for such an upgrade…
Posted on December 15, 2005
Juanxer Says:
But then external SATA supports longer copper cable lengths than FW without needing expensive fiber optics (plus there are already other FO solutions around).
The only way I see FW800 taking off is the industry being already committed to producing the relevant chips even if just because of deployment timetable inertia, and being determined to cover costs, a bit much like the whole blue ray laser DVDs thing (quite unneeded for HD, given current codec advances). I mean, even Ethernet is getting faster than FW800.
Posted on December 16, 2005
Juanxer Says:
Also, I don’t think it is a good idea to introduce FW800 in consumer laptops: it dilutes an already a bit diminished connection standard (outside the desktop video and audio world), things getting rather confusing with another socket shape and need for FW400 adaptors.
Posted on December 16, 2005
DopeyDan Says:
What the F? The beta version of Longhorn doesn’t support FW800 - when will M$ get it? The unibrain stack doesn’t #### as much as the orangemicro one does, but it still blows.
Posted on December 16, 2005
Juanxer Says:
Perhaps that’s because it is still a beta? :D
Posted on December 16, 2005
Wayne Says:
Being a Mac service person, I don’t know what I would do without Firewire. Being able to boot via Firewire from other Macs or external hard drives, or just backing up huge amounts of data is tremendously useful during when troubleshooting customer’s Macs. SCSI was a pain and USB 2 just doesn’t cut it (not yet anyway). I hope I’m wrong, but I’ve bee predicting to my co-workers for a number of months now that Apple may start to phase out Firewire on a lot of it’s future Mac releases. The complete elimination of Firewire on iPods has fueled this belief. For reason, I could never understand, Firewire it almost non-existent on PC’s. With the transition to Intel chips next year, I fully expect Apple to drop Firewire on consumer Macs, perhaps to keep costs down. On the flipside, I’d be very surprised to see Firewire left out of future Powermacs.
Just me 2 cents.
Posted on December 16, 2005
Anthony King Says:
Hey guys read my take at MacMod. Here’s my article “Firewire Future Uncertain”
Posted on December 16, 2005
Juanxer Says:
I don’t think we have to worry about FW400, and for Apple it would be absolutely crazy to cripple iLife so deeply.
One possibility I see, hearing those rumours about “solid state” iBooks (Flash RAM based diskless laptops), is that happening to such a discrete line of products: one wouldn’t expect to do video editing there. If Apple does a lightweight MacTablet, that would be a fairly tolerable limitation.
Posted on December 16, 2005
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
Michael Says:
Actually FW800 does not compete well with SATA interfaces. FW800 is almost twice as slow as SATA when used in a four drive striped RAID. In addition, FW800 costs considerably more as a result of the high cost of the bridge. Apple has used FW800 as a sales tool for keeping some users buying PowerMacs but this same “small” install base causes the price to be high and demand to be low for FW800 enclosures. SATA is taking over the fast storage market due to Apples failure to use FW800 across the line. Another little known fact is that FW800 does not convert well to FW400. If you use any adapter to connect a FW400 computer with a FW800 enclosure testing shows that the connection is significantly slower than if a FW400 enclosure was used instead. FireWire is doomed to be a slow protocol like USB for computers that do not have expansion slots. It cannot compete in speed or price on a computer that supports both SATA and FW800.
Posted on December 15, 2005