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Helpful Information
4. Helpful Information
4.1. Advice For Optimizing FireWire Connections
The following technical information relates to your LaCie mini drive and gives some practical advice:
4.1.1. What is FireWire/IEEE 1394?
A serial bus used to connect external computer and consumer electronic devices to computers and
consumer electronic consoles.
What does IEEE 1394 mean?
“1394” is an abbreviation of IEEE 1394, the name given to this high-performance serial bus.
IEEE (the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers) is the name of the engineering corps
that developed this standard. The 1394 refers to the 1,394th stanard that the IEEE has produced.
What is the relationship between IEEE 1394, FireWire, iLink and DV?
These four names all refer to the same interface:
•IEEE 1394 - the name of the standard, used in the computer industry.
•FireWire - the brand name used by Apple.
•iLink - the brand name used by Sony.
•DV - logo used by video camcorder manufacturers.
What can the FireWire interface be used for?
With its high data transfer rates, FireWire is a great interface for consumer electronics, like CD and
DVD recorders, external hard drives and video devices, such as digital camcorders, because it has
an extremely large bandwidth and supports two types of data transfer (anyschronus and isochro-
nous) which help to guarantee the transfer of time-critical data.
FireWire is also a point-to-point interface, meaning that a FireWire device can transmit data to another FireWire device
without having to go through a computer. This lets several computers share a given device, and also allows up to 63 devices
to be daisy-chained to the same FireWire bus (with a max of 16 devices on one branch). To daisy-chain, connect your one
FireWire drive directly to the computer, then connect another FireWire drive to the first FireWire drive, then another until
you reach 16. Then do the same on the rest of the ports on the FireWire bus.
DigitalVideo
FireWire
iLink
