I noticed something interesting with my new mobo that I bought over the weekend (Asus M4A785T-M). The last 6 years or so, every mobo that I bought, either for myself or for others, they all had a header on the mobo for a Firewire port. I can only recall using this port to charge Apple iPod (The first Mini I believe) and nothing else. I've never really used it for data transfer or as a LAN port (Which they could emulate a NIC under Windows). I have a CoolerMaster Centurion 590 case which has a Firewire port on the front of it. Seeing that my new mobo doesn't support it, I cannot connect the case header for this port. The questions ask:

 

1). Is it possible to use a Firewire connector in unraid to read/write to a external disk, and

 

2). If so, is it worth it?

 

I wouldn't imagine it would be worth the trouble seeing that USB2 standards basically supersede it in terms of speed. Is worth bothering with Firewire anymore? Thanks.

Firewire is faster and less CPU intensive then USB.

Firewire is not supported directly in unRAID.

 

Where firewire has benefit, you can daisy chain lots and lots of drives.

 

Is it worth it at the current time. I would say no.

eSATA would be the suggested way to go for speed at the current time.

firewire would require a custom kernel and some tools and the benefit would be less then the effort to get it working (Unless you already had a slew of firewire drives available).

Thanks for the reply WeeboTech. I kind of figured Fireware was a dying breed of data connections. It has been a long time since I've used FireWire for anything useful and the thought came to mind noticing I didn't have a header on the mobo for it. Come to think of it, a lot of newer cases don't even have them anymore too. Too much effort for something I'll never use either. Thanks again.

Yeah, its too bad, I always wished firewire had become the standard instead of USB.  USB is just so slow and annoying.  Ah well, eSATA is pretty sweet too.

I always thought Firewire was something PC was trying to inherit from Mac for the sake of getting more devices to run on PC and a faster alternative to USB1 too. In all my years of IT, I saw very little use of it. eSATA (for a storage point of view) would eclipse it in many ways, speed, availability, albeit compatibility for more storage devices supporting it too.

I know Firewire was a multi-port device connector (much like the USB Port), but for devices which are non storage related, USB2 and upcoming USB3 will be taking over. I new some who used it as a great PC-to-PC local Lan connection to transfer data between hosts locally given that Lan speeds at one time were restricted to only 100Mbps. I believe Mac ditched Firewire long before PC slowly started dropping it.

I always thought Firewire was something PC was trying to inherit from Mac for the sake of getting more devices to run on PC and a faster alternative to USB1 too. In all my years of IT, I saw very little use of it. eSATA (for a storage point of view) would eclipse it in many ways, speed, availability, albeit compatibility for more storage devices supporting it too.

I know Firewire was a multi-port device connector (much like the USB Port), but for devices which are non storage related, USB2 and upcoming USB3 will be taking over. I new some who used it as a great PC-to-PC local Lan connection to transfer data between hosts locally given that Lan speeds at one time were restricted to only 100Mbps. I believe Mac ditched Firewire long before PC slowly started dropping it.

 

Firewire is still very much alive on the Mac side.  They are starting to move away from it a little bit but it is still in use.  The Macbook Pro I have has 1 Firewire 800 port and 1 firewire 400 port.  I do not use the 800 port but the 400 is used quite a bit to do bootable backs of my laptop.  I have an external HDD that i connect via firewire and then use Carbon Copy Cloner to make an exact clone of the internal drive.

I had a device that supported firewire and usb.  The same hard drive performed very fast with linux under firewire vs linux and USB. It was so fast it was almost like accessing the drive locally via P-ATA.

 

Also I think with firewire you could have multiple hosts connected to the same hard drive and share data as long as only one host owned the device at a time. Cool for clustering.

 

I know many musicians who use firewire drives on mac for recording and production projects.

 

It had it's hey day in PC land for storage. Most PC people I know these days use it for their video cameras.

Firewire is used with digital video and will be for a long time.  You can connect a DV camera or a hard drive to a computer with it.  Esata doesn't fill that need.  Also, firewire can be networked so you can have a super fast network connection if needed.  

I remember setting up raid 0 on 5400 rpm hard drives to be able to capure live analog video.  Firewire and DV was an absolute dream come true for home video.

Hi queeg. At the moment it might suffice, but I think when USB3 becomes more main stream, it would supersede a aging data port for the purposes of AV equipment I predict. I know eSATA cannot fill the shoes for AV, but I think USB3 will.

 

Firewire is used with digital video and will be for a long time.  You can connect a DV camera or a hard drive to a computer with it.  Esata doesn't fill that need.  Also, firewire can be networked so you can have a super fast network connection if needed.  

I remember setting up raid 0 on 5400 rpm hard drives to be able to capure live analog video.  Firewire and DV was an absolute dream come true for home video.

Hi queeg. At the moment it might suffice, but I think when USB3 becomes more main stream, it would supersede a aging data port for the purposes of AV equipment I predict. I know eSATA cannot fill the shoes for AV, but I think USB3 will.

 

Firewire is used with digital video and will be for a long time.  You can connect a DV camera or a hard drive to a computer with it.  Esata doesn't fill that need.  Also, firewire can be networked so you can have a super fast network connection if needed.  

I remember setting up raid 0 on 5400 rpm hard drives to be able to capure live analog video.  Firewire and DV was an absolute dream come true for home video.

 

Generally, the usb connector on a video camera will only allow the transfer of the still shots, not the video.  It's going to take 10 more years at least to see all the AV equipment support usb3.  And the expensive equipment will be firewire for longer because the community is set up for that.

I guess your right on that point. For the AV industry, it would be highly used and probably be around for some time to come, but for data disk transfers in external drive enclosures, besides a few already using it, I would think its time is phasing out.

Yeah, for non video stuff eSata is the way to go.  Much cheaper than firewire.

I always thought Firewire was something PC was trying to inherit from Mac for the sake of getting more devices to run on PC and a faster alternative to USB1 too. In all my years of IT, I saw very little use of it. eSATA (for a storage point of view) would eclipse it in many ways, speed, availability, albeit compatibility for more storage devices supporting it too.

I know Firewire was a multi-port device connector (much like the USB Port), but for devices which are non storage related, USB2 and upcoming USB3 will be taking over. I new some who used it as a great PC-to-PC local Lan connection to transfer data between hosts locally given that Lan speeds at one time were restricted to only 100Mbps. I believe Mac ditched Firewire long before PC slowly started dropping it.

 

Firewire is still alive and well in Macs and is used extensively in Pro Audio and Video. Only the lower cost Mac laptops have dropped FW maybe because Apple is trying to prop up purchases for the more expensive models.

I'm noticing (in the PC world though) that the use of Firewire is dropping in popularity, and an example would include on PC cases. You would see even the cheap tin-made cases have a Firewire port on the front of the case, now, it is becoming a less and less of a common thing to see this port from the cheap to good cases. I'm also seeing a lot of storage devices that just come on the market like portable disks are not using it anymore, favouring either Gigabit Ethernet (like a mini-NAS solution), USB2/3 ports and eSATA or all of the above. I remember it being heavily used for external DVD Burners when they first landed in the market, AV gear for sure relied on it (and I guess it still does), top of the line scanners, and storage too.