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Comment by jwells89

3 years ago

Target disk mode over FireWire was magical back in the day. Nothing like turning someone’s laptop into an oversized external hard drive to rescue data or get a borked OS X installation booting again.

23 comments

jwells89

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xattt  3 years ago

FireWire had IP networking stacks in Windows and OS X in 2007. You could daisy chain a bunch of devices together to share a network connection.

  • FirmwareBurner  3 years ago

    Sure but it was very expensive compared to USB and Ethernet so Firewire never caught on with mainstream conumers other than some niche cases like camcorders.

    Thunderbolt was also expensive, which is why adoption was limited, but it's becoming more maisntream since Intel and Apple have been pushing it in the last years, adn piggibacking over USB-C makes it an easy sell comapred to requireing a separate connector like firewire.

    Still, thunderbolt peripherals are way more expensive than USB ones, so like Firewire before, use is still more in the enthusianst/professional space.

    • GeekyBear  3 years ago

      > it was very expensive compared to USB and Ethernet so Firewire never caught on

      Compared to Gigabit Ethernet back in that time period? Firewire was a huge bargain.

      9 replies →

Fnoord  3 years ago

Way before that there was SCSI.

The low cost is price. Asus for example with their ASUS ThunderboltEX 4 allows you to have TB4 via PCIe card.

The neat thing about USB4 was same as PATA and later SATA: widely and relatively cheap available in consumer hardware. SCSI and FireWire were technically superior but were neither cheap nor widely available.

Oh and I don't know about SCSI but FireWire was actually a security risk.

  • tga_d  3 years ago

    I know thunderbolt at least up through 3 was generally carte blanche DMA, so an obvious security nightmare (strictly speaking no worse than cold boot attacks and the like, but there's a practicality difference between dumping raw DIMMs and just plugging in a thumb drive -- or inter-machine links like TFA, for that matter). Does TB4 bother trying to solve this?

    • p_l  3 years ago

      Not really. Just like with OHCI 1394, it's responsibility of host IOMMU to handle it.

  • vegardx  3 years ago

    Just a fair warning about these cards, the support is flakey at best. You should research if it works with your motherboard and CPU before going down that route. I did a lot of research on this because I wanted to connect my Gaming-PC to an Apple Studio Display over optical Thunderbolt, but quickly decided against it.

    Luckily there are good alternatives. I landed on a solution using a Belkin[0] DisplayPort and USB to Thunderbolt-cable. I just get USB2.0 speeds, but it's enough for my needs. I'm also able to extend it using an active DisplayPort 1.4 extender, for a total of 10 meters cable.

    [0] https://www.belkin.com/support-article/?articleNum=316883

bimguy  3 years ago

Target disk mode to my workstation and saving someone's whole system with Disk Warrior used to be my favourite and most rewarding task. APFS did away with that joy, if a Mac OS systems fails now you have almost no chance of saving the system from itself.

RachelF  3 years ago

Yeah, we built a similar system a generation ago using FireWire on x86 and Linux.

FireWire at 800Mbps beat Gigabit Ethernet in terms of latency for a rather hard real-time system.

  • rabi_molar  3 years ago

    I remember the "good ol days" when I would always opt for a FireWire audio interface for music production and live performance over USB for exactly this reason. I'd get way better latency and stability.