Since it came up, here's a list of things Firewire does better then eSATA:
Bus powered: eSATA drives require an external power supply. Firewire drives can be bus powered. Chaining: You can have 63 Firewire devices on a single chain, eSATA has a max of 15. Cable length: Cable length is restricted to 2M for eSata drives. Firewire 400 is 4.5M, Firewire 800 and 3200 is 100M. Additionally, Firewire 400 cables can be daisy chained up to 72M. If you need to use an eSATA to SATA passive adapter, max cable length is further reduced to 1M.
So I'm not saying eSATA won't become popular, I'm just saying Firewire does have some significant advantages over it right now in addition to much deeper market penetration, since it's been widely available for about 10 years now.
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Since it came up, here's a list of things Firewire does better then eSATA:
Bus powered: eSATA drives require an external power supply. Firewire drives can be bus powered.
Chaining: You can have 63 Firewire devices on a single chain, eSATA has a max of 15.
Cable length: Cable length is restricted to 2M for eSata drives. Firewire 400 is 4.5M, Firewire 800 and 3200 is 100M. Additionally, Firewire 400 cables can be daisy chained up to 72M.
If you need to use an eSATA to SATA passive adapter, max cable length is further reduced to 1M.
So I'm not saying eSATA won't become popular, I'm just saying Firewire does have some significant advantages over it right now in addition to much deeper market penetration, since it's been widely available for about 10 years now.