LaCie, a peripheral building company hailing out of France, has cornered the market on the second generation of Firewire chips from Oxford Semiconductor (this company builds the fastest Firewire bridge chips) and in a major coup, announced it would be the first company to release all new components based on the new designs.
The following is from MacNN.com: LaCie said its plans to be the first to market with FireWire2/1394b products, offering data-transfer speeds of 800Mbps, after it purchased the first shipment of FireWire 2 (1394b) bridges from manufacturer Oxford Semiconductor, according to Macworld UK. The company said it plans to release new products integrating the technology before anyone else and is "discussing plans to introduce mass-storage products encased in its new-look D2 enclosures with capacities in excess of 300GB." ============ I wonder if those >300gb drives will be high speed or not (7200 rpm or faster). If so, you could have a new video capable Mac with over a terabyte of storage space (alas, it will require an OS upgrade to access all of the drive space though). If not, these could make network attached storage devices worth buying -- that one is a bit of a stretch as it is cheaper to buy a computer with lots of drive space and use it as a server. Jerry The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be October 22 For more information, see <http://www.aye.net/~lcs>. A calendar of activities is at <http://www.calsnet.net/macusers>.
