MadMode

Worse is better for external disk enclosures too

I got a USB 2.0 disk enclosure this week. It's much quieter than the FireWire enclosure I bought in Oct 2003. I thought surely it was slower, but it's not.

I learned assembly on a 6809E; I thought people were crazy to deal with the 8-bit shackles of the 6502 and the broken segmented architecture of the 8086, though I could see Intel beat Motorola to market with each new generation. I'm a sucker for elegant technology. I paid the SCSI premium for years. I never actually bought a NuBus Mac nor a Newton, but I wanted to. I bought 2 PowerPC Macs, the last one just before even Apple switched to Intel. But slowly, I'm learning: worse is better. As a Web guy, I should know that even a dollar per part is a lot when you're talking about hundreds of millions of parts...

However, Intel was not interested in paying the near-dollar license fee to add an IEEE 1394 subsystem to their board. The fee was reduced to a flat 25 cents, but Intel prefered to push for its own USB 2.0 standard. As a result, they were rarely provided as standard equipment on computers other than Apple Macintosh computers (Apple owns rights to the FireWire standard), and peripheral manufacturers offered many more USB devices.

I divested from SCSI a few years aog; all my disks are commodity IDE now. I'm keeping an eye on SATA but haven't jumped yet.