[Gllug] OT Firewire/Fast Networking

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Mon, 2002-12-09 at 23:14, Matthew Thompson wrote:
> > No. Firewire gives 50KB/s, while modern IDE drives can handle 100MB/s 
> > or
> > more (in bursts, at least -- sustained numbers are likely to be a bit 
> > lower).
> 
> Firewire is rated at 400Mbps however it is the Oxford 911 chipset that 
> is used in most Firewire drives which will be the bottleneck here - 
> this limits to around 40Mbps.

I've not met the Oxford chipset so can't comment on it's performance or
lack thereof. However, I've got an Adaptec firewire card, and I can
happily get it bursting to nearly 200Mbps with my Iomega peerless drive.
The bottleneck is the transfer rate of the disk - I'd be surprised if I
couldn't get the full rated speed out of the interface.

> Firewire is limited to a hub arrangements and does not have the 
> distances required for a classroom of 23 computers.

While not especially pretty, most firewire cards have several ports.
AFAIK there's nothing to stop someone daisy-chaining machines together,
running IP over firewire, and doing bridging on all the machines. There
seem to be two networking implementations for firewire, one that is just
IP over 1394, whereas the other presents a virtual ethernet device.

Whether this is a cost effective and sensible way to network is another
matter of course, but it would be fun to try....

Mike.


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