The Evolution of Digital Technology

On a recent trip to Sim Lim with brother Bingjun, we discovered that there's something called Firewire 400 and Firewire 800. By logical deduction, we concluded that Fire 400 was old technology i.e. the most current one that most of us have on our laptops but don't use it much or even at all. We were looking at 3.5" 1TB (that's terabyte for all you cool punky non-geeks) harddisks, and the price difference between one with Firewire 800 connection and one without is quite significant. So we tasked ourselves (actually, I tasked me) to go home and do some research first. After all, I'm not in a hurry to get another high-capacity harddisk, and COMEX is coming up at the end of the month.

Well, as procrastination goes, I didn't do my research. Not until last night when I tried scanning some film did I realize I don't have much space left! Well, I was scanning Medium Format (hereon known as MF; not to be confused with Manual Focus) film at the highest resolution my scanner could scan at. When I can't scan anymore, I was told that I ran out of disk space! Shocked, I went to check my remaining space: 400+ MB. 400MB!!! How can that be? I couldn't figure out what took up all the space since I haven't been shooting much lately and I haven't been downloading at all. I had no choice but to not save the scanned photos. What a waste of time.

Well, I guess I DO need a new harddisk now. Don't know if I can last till end of the month. I'm guessing yes. But I need to know more than those punk temp sales-kids before the show, otherwise I'd be buying a load of junk and I'd be happy about it.

So I Yahoo!ed Firewire 800. Lo and behold! Firewire 800 has transfer speeds of up to 800Mbps! 800!!! That's twice that of Firewire 400 man! And for all you non-geeks, Mbps = megaBITS per second, not megaBYTES... What's the difference? Generally, 8bits = 1byte, so Firewire 800 has a transfer rate of 100MBps. Firewire 800 is also known as IEEE 1394b. IEEE 1394a (Firewire 400) has a slightly slower transfer rate than USB 2.0, that's why most people use USB 2.0 nowadays.

Anyways, in the midst of reading up, I discovered that there's a USB 3.0 due to be released soon! What's the difference then? Well, USB 3.0 has a tenfold increase in transfer rate from USB 2.0. That means 4.8Gbps! Ooooo... When that standard becomes ubiquitous, I think it's time for me to get a new laptop. Unfortunately, that's old news, apparently. USB 3.0 was due is the first half of 2008, but I haven't heard any buzz about it thus far. *shrugs* No matter. I foresee my laptop to last me another 2 or 3 years at least, so let's hope by then, things would've improved significantly and prices would've dropped significantly too. Heh heh heh... *rubs hands together*

For those of you lost in the jargon of technological chatter, I've decided to list the transfer speeds below:

USB 1.1: 12 Mbps
USB 2.0: 480 Mbps
USB 3.0: 4800 Mbps
Firewire 400: 400 Mbps
Firewire 800: 800 Mbps

Do note that in real world testing of USB 2.0 vs Firewire 400, the latter still emerges as winner in terms of speed even though specs say otherwise. In USB 2.0's defence, it was only behind by a marginal difference.

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Whoa... lots of crazy stuff in my head when I'm bored. Haha! Yes, I am VERY bored in office. To be honest, Compliance is less busy than CSC. No, let me rephrase that: I have less work at Compliance than I had at CSC. Me. I can't say for the others coz Miang Cze and Gavin are like, always busy... haha!

*sigh* Oh wells...

*yawn* I hate lunch. I hate even more, the time after lunch. Coz I feel like sleeping... *yawn*