marnik.org

IDE to USB2.0 and FireWire

Monday 11 April 2005 om 09u37

I’ve been wanting to buy this for a long time, and now I finally found exactly what I want on Ebay. For those of you who don’t know/see what this is, this is a 3.5″ External Housing with USB2.0 and FireWire for IDE-devices, a tool to transform an internal harddisk to an external one.

I wanted an external harddisk that I could use to share files between my desktop and my portable, but I had one little problem: my portable doesn’t have USB2.0, it only has 2 USB1.0 (or 1.1?) ports, which is too slow.
But problems exist to be solved, and so I bought PCMCIA-card with 4 USB2.0 ports (also on Ebay). Now there are a few other problems

• I have a PCMCIA wireless card, and I can’t use both at the same time
• PCMCIA is needs to be plugged in, plugged out, plugged back in, out, …

So, long story short, I sold the PCMCIA-card with USB2.0 the same day it arrived at my door, because I discovered I have FireWire on my portable and USB2.0 on my desktop. Not that I didn’t know this, but I didn’t think of it. I use the FireWire for Digital Video (as you can read here) but I didn’t think of it as a USB2.0 replacement.
Hell, it’s even a lot better than USB2.0. Why? Because it doesn’t use your processor as much as USB. Although USB2.0 has a 480mbit maximum, and FireWire has a 400mbit maximum, FireWire will outperform USB2.0 most of the time. I am now waiting for this guy to inform me of the shipping costs (since I’m buying for some friends too) and then I can pay and wait for my external case

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