SuperDuper Firewire
By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Uncategorized on December 18, 2007 at 9:23 am
Last week, two pieces of news slipped out both of which will bring about some must-have new features next year.
The first is that Firewire is to be extended to speeds up to 3.2 Gigabits per second. The 1394 Trade Association say this will quadruple Firewire’s maximum speed but will stay compatible with existing plugs, cables and devices. With the right cables the new S3200 specification will be able to work at distances over 100 meters. Plus it comes with the usual Firewire features such as power through the cable, no management software to worry about, hot swapping and the ability to boot a computer.
We are big fans of Firewire and tested our external drives through all the interfaces we had, long ago. Firewire 800 is already leagues ahead of USB2 and even Firewire 400 is much faster than USB2 when it comes to sustained read/writes such as copying from one drive to another. In our tests, moving 500GB is still a slow process but both Firewire 400 and 800 did it in hours rather than the day that USB2 managed.
Better still, with Apple’s Mac OS X, Firewire has the no-hassle networking capabilities and at 3.2 Gigabits per second that makes transfer speeds approaching 400 megabytes per second.
Disk duper even more Super
We’ve been beta testers for SuperDuper for some years, ever since Mac OS X arrived. For safe cloning of bootable, complete operating systems, SuperDuper is the easiest, quickest and best we have found with many different tweaks to automatically symlink the same User folder to each operating system, for example, or to smart-update only changed files.
When Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was released it broke SuperDuper in a big way. Trying to smart-update a drive with Time Machine and SuperDuper on will erase Time Machines files because they do not exist on the source volume. We got caught by another little glitch introduced in Leopard but David Nanian, SuperDuper’s developer, showed us a fast and dirty way to get things nearly there. Since then he’s found a lot more will need changing to make SuperDuper work with Leopard. In his notes here David explains the delay but gives some tantalising glimpses of the new SuperDuper.
The new SuperDuper will work in conjunction with Time Machine so that both can have archives on the same disk without interfering with each other. SuperDuper will also be able to clone those disks. Currently if you try to copy a Time Machine archive to another disk, Time Machine will not recognise it as a legitimate archive. There are many more changes in the yet to be announced SuperDuper which as ever will be a free upgrade for registered users. The time limited demo can be converted to the full program for a modest fee of less than fifteen quid.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Comment by Jacques Daviault - December 18, 2007 on 9:27 pm
And why Apple dumped the iPod’s Firewire connection and left only a USB 2 one is beyond me. Isn’t Apple one of the Firewire patent holders and largely responsible for the creation and promotion of the standard? So, it begs the questions: why does USB gets so much hype? Can Firewire also power a peripheral, and if not perhaps this explains the popularity of USB. Your thoughts Mark?
Comment by Mark Tennent - December 19, 2007 on 8:55 am
Hi Jacques
What’s the weather like in Montreal?
I suppose Apple dropped Firewire because they didn’t want to have to make two versions of iPods, a Firewire one and a USB for those computers who are socketedly challenged. Our iPod Nano is far slower to fill compared with Firewire iPods yet the file sizes we throw to it are much larger mp4 movies than mp3 tracks.
My original iPod came with a proper Firewire cable which is thin enough to slip into a pocket yet long enough to connect Mac to Mac for an instant high speed network and System disk repairs.
When the iPod first appeared, USB was too slow to fill its 20GB hard disk at any reasonable speed. My old iPod now has a second life as a trouble-shooting start-up disk and transportable hard disk.
Firewire can power peripherals through the cable, an EyeTV 410 for example, needs no external power supply. It’s also possible to run Firewire devices without a computer and to daisy-chain them together. USB can do none of these nor boot a computer.
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