[Gllug] emulating a pendrive

[Peter Corlett]

On 13 Oct 2009, at 22:13, Nix wrote:
[...]
> After the Big Upgrade earlier this year, all my non-embedded machines
> now have firewire ports, but I'm not sure I've ever actually seen
> anything that can plug into them. Everything seems to be USB.

Yes, because it's cheaper to build a USB device than a Firewire one.  
It's VHS versus Betamax again.

> What's firewire actually used for?


It's used a little bit more in the Mac than the PC world, although  
it's hardly vibrant there either.

I mainly use it to recover the tattered remains of filesystems from  
Mac laptops that have had a bad day. Also, given the option, I'll also  
prefer an external Firewire drive to USB because it's just so much  
faster.

OTOH, I don't exactly use my USB ports for much. The iPod, external  
disks, and my 3G dongle are about it. Considering that the iPod and  
disks are just doing SCSI-over-USB and the dongle is doing RS232-over- 
USB, it's still debatable whether we've really gained anything useful  
over the last decade or so...


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