For years I've been using four external hard drives on my home server attached by Firewire. But I've run out of space, and it was time to start adding similar drives, but there's one problem - notice that there's no Firewire port, only USB. In fact it has become nearly impossible to buy external drives with Firewire support. Firewire is essentially dead at this point, so I will take a moment to honor it today and move on. But that means I've got to figure out a way to make USB work instead of Firewire, and I do have a way figured out to do that, which I'm going to show you in a moment. But first, I wanted to take a moment to show you why I thought Firewire was so cool. In the early days such as with this old iBook, computers had both USB and Firewire. The reason was obvious, as Firewire had a blazingly fast 400 megabits per second and USB was only 12. So USB was used for keyboards and mice and Firewire was used for like external storage devices and even webcams, and keep in mind Firewire was essentially designed to replace these bulky SCSI cables like these and USB on the other hand was never really designed with the idea of being used for external storage devices. In fact, most operating systems at that time didn't even have native support for mass storage devices like USB flash drives or hard drives. Microsoft first officially supported it in Windows 2000 and Apple first supported it in Mac OS 9. Firewire could support up to 63 devices and USB could support up to 127. But Firewire could daisy chain. Notice that any Firewire device has two ports, so that you can chain more devices. So in the case of my server, I had one Firewire port on the Mac mini, and it was elegantly daisy chained to the four drives. USB on the other hand would require separate port for each drive, but even then you'll run out of ports for your keyboards and mice. But you can get around this by using a hub and then attaching all your devices to the hub. Firewire is also peer-to-peer whereas USB uses client-host architecture. Now what that means is with Firewire, you can connect a laptop to a hard drive. OK great, but you can even connect two laptops together using nothing but a firewire cable, you can't do that on USB. So another cool thing about Firewire is that it supplied a lot more power to the external devices, although USB has also finally caught up with that in the newer versions because everyone is trying to charge their phones and tablets on USB now. And the cable length was actually pretty close on these. Okay, so a few years later, USB got upgraded to 2.0, and at that point the speed was much better at 480 megabits per second. Now you might actually compare these two numbers here and think that it was faster than Firewire, but in practice it wasn't. So I've actually done direct tests and actually discovered that Firewire 400 is still just a hair faster than USB 2.0. That's probably mostly to do with the heavy CPU overhead that USB had. Of course it was a moot point anyway, since around the same time Firewire upgraded at speed 800 megabits per second and even the cable length to a staggering 100 meters, but the battle was not won because USB eventually upgraded again, and now we're at 5 gigabits per second. So I'm going to miss Firewire mostly for the daisy-chaining capability. I went ahead and I bought this 7-port USB for my server. As usual, it was not designed to be wall-mounted, but I have ways of fixing that with some custom-made brackets. So I screwed this thing down on my wall in my network closet, and then I set up some cable management squares. And even though I've managed to make this look pretty nice and clean, it's still way messier than it was when I could use Firewire. So there you have it. This episode is almost like my eulogy for Firewire and I'm going to miss it, especially the daisy-chaining, but I think the future is pretty bright. USB has come a long way and for the most part it's going to happily replace Firewire, And I don't really have any problem with it, So I hope you found this episode interesting and uh, if you did then go ahead and click the "Like" button that tells YouTube that I'm doing a good job, and if you haven't already, subscribe to my channel. And I've got some other great stuff coming up real soon, so I'll see you next time!
