FAT32 isn't a "drive", it's a file system. Just like FAT16, NTFS, ext3, etc. They wrote a standard method to handle files on a system, and in this case they wrote in large overhead into their standard for future growth. Essentially a "software solution" of just giving the ability to read larger clusters.
You're right that it has nothing to do with hardware, either does the 1394b standard.
I know all of this, but I definitely disagree that the 1394b standard has nothing to do with hardware. Are you saying that you can take current 800 mbps cards and magically make them 3.2 gbps cards? Cuz that's more or less what you can do with FAT32.
Your asking the cost of a device that can transfer data at 1.6mbps (surely you mean GB/s) "that won't even use 800mpbs?" I don't get the "won't use 800MB/s" thing. What do you mean by 'won't use'?
Name one piece of hardware out there that would benefit from a faster bus. And yes, the peripherals will be begging for a faster implementation of firewire before it's actually implemented. There's a reason current firewire cards top out at 800 mbps-nothing can go faster than that. Hard drive? No way, the drive doesn't max out the bus. Scanner? This is a good example of a peripheral begging for a faster bus. Scanners existed for a loooong time and were slow as hell simply because of the bus. Have the scanners changed? No, not really, just the bus has gotten bigger so that all of the data can be transmitted more quickly. The device existed first, and then the bus came.
What else is there? Keyboard, mouse, game controllers, flash memory cards/keys, dvd burners, cd burners, etc etc, all of which would not benefit from a faster bus than is already in use. No use for the faster bus=no money spent in making new firewire cards capable of the speeds. Yes, the
standard exists for 3.2 gbps (yeah that was a typo in my other post), but it's going to cost money to implement it. If it didn't, current 1394b cards would be capable of 3.2 gbps instead of their current limit of 800 mbps.
Topic: Firewire: what the hell is it? (Read 4148 times)