using only USB harddisks ?

[Robert Brockway]

On Wed, 21 Jul 2004, William Park wrote:

> Anyone using USB harddisk?  I'm interested whether one could skip IDE
> and go USB for all harddisks.  I don't see any way to boot from USB on
> my BIOS... perhaps, newer motherboard has that option.

I'd go Firewire-2 to take advantage of its 800Mb/s.  The problem with
either USB or Firewire is that the bus is a broadcast bus.  So the 800Mb/s
must be shared between all devices.  I think Firewire/USB are great if you
need a lot of storage[1] but don't necessarily need really fast access
times.

For low end/home systems I think using Firewire-2 would probably provide
acceptable performance and allow for a lot of scalability.

An alternative is to put the system disk(s) on ATA133 channels and have
all other data accessible via firewire.

[1] The drives can be daisy-chained but there is a limits to the length of
any one chain.

Rob

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Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert-5LEc/6Zm6xCUd8a0hrldnti2O/JbrIOy at public.gmane.org, rbrockway-cFo9iiqjkw8eIZ0/mPfg9Q at public.gmane.org
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