Wishlist: Flash Card Reader Attachment

Originally posted by sraphim
AFAIK, the iPod only supports being a USB client node, and can't have other perheperials attached to it (for example, a flash card reader). I don't know much about firewire, but even if it was two ways (where a device can be the bus or a client), I doubt that Apple is going to release the right firmware to support it. Moreover, I haven't seen any firewire flash card readers.

One thing that really annoys me about Apple is the fact that they are always into "simplicty and elegance", and shunning the addition of features. Sure, I can agree that the iPod is both simple and elegant, but sometimes, it's good to have features as well. There's a thin line between simplicity and trapping the user in an intolerably small space.

Apple went well out of its way to ad the data port to the 3rd gen iPods. They knew very well that way would be disrupting the "iPod economy" by making two generations of peripherals obsolete. I can't imagine they did that just so they could have a cute dock. An audio recording peripheral is almost surely on its way. Also, Firewire flash card readers are getting more popular every day, as digital cameras continue to soar in resolution. There are plenty around.

ephraim, are you kidding?!

Just look at it! the firewire is 6 pin, usb i beleive is is 7 or 8, and there has to be close to 24 pins! Yah gotta figure that the audio only takes about 4 pins, leaving another 8 pins for periphrials. I gotta think that while in the dock, there may not be much more left, but while out of the dock, we could see huge addons. The car reader, a way to connect to other devices (imagine a digital camera w/ 30 gb of space!!!), is definately coming.

KeaneE04: You misunderstood my point. Yeah, sure, it's got a bunch of extra pins for who-knows-what in the future (as I admitted above). But at the center of all that is still a FireWire port, which is more than enough of a data transfer I/O, considering that the iPod's hard drive can't read/write at a rate even close to that of the FW stream's potential.

What I'm saying is: There's nothing in the 3rd-gen iPods that wasn't in the older models that would in any way provide new capabilities in terms of data transfer in and out.

Actually ephraim, the HD can write much quicker than simple firewire can handle, hence the need for ribbon cable inside the computer, hooking up all the drives. The HD can write quicker than any connection type except for the ribbon cable.

Now, it is possible that this could still be done with the old firewire port ipods (as ive seen it done seemelssly for computers), but using the dock connector could possibly max out the HD write speed for the ipod (still unlikely, but the closer the better).

Seriously, who would really buy a HD that could only write at less than 400mb/s? lol, floppies are barely below that i beleive!! My CD burner writes at 1200 mb/s or better (actually 3600mb/s at 24x), and i have seen 54x drives, which we could assume closes in on 7200mb/s.

So no, firewire is amazingly slow in comparison, thank you very much.

I think its going a bit off topic but i thought id clarify a few things.

Both of you are right and wrong regarding the firewire performance you both made the similar mistakes of refering to the max speed of the technology rather than real-world speed.

Firewire is 400Mbits/s with a theoretical speed of 50MBytes/s
An external firewire hdd the fastest read performance is roughly 25-30MBytes/s.

An ATA133 interface has theoretical performance of 133MBytes/s
A 7200rpm HDD has Max read performance of 50-60MBytes/s
Single SCSI drive hit 70MBytes/s, due to higher spindle speeds

A 54X CDROM Drive has a maximum throughput of 7.5MBytes/s but an average of under 6MBytes/s

I used Maximun Read rates here as they are the fastest figure for drives. External firewire hdds are the same as thier internal counterparts.

Ive investigated the data rates for laptop hdds and the average Max Read performance is 20Mb/s which seems to complement firewire quite nicely.

Regarding the data port remember that their is a firewire AND usb2 version of the data cable and since these have to go thru different data controllers this accounts for not only the number of ping but also the most likely reason apple changed from a firewire port to a propriatory connector.

Its difficult to predict whether a flash reader would be possible as i dont fully know how firewire controller on the iPod acts. It would be possible if the controller has client to client capailities.

I too would really love to get a firewire memory card reader interface to the iPod.

The hardware to attach the reader exists (e.g. Lexar Firewire Compact Flash Reader), at least for the iPods with a standard firewire connector. Surely adding this functionality via software on the computer would not be THAT difficult. The market for digital film readers with hard drives is split between readers with no displays, running about $200-$250 with a hard drive, and units with color displays, which are in excess of $500. Certainly none of them have the small form-factor of the iPod (existing units are generally based on 2.5" IDE drives).

A card reader add-on could cost in the neighborhood of $50 and prove to be invaluable to the amateur or professional photographer. With 4+ megapixel cameras becoming commonplace, it seems that the need for offline storage of pictures is growing. Simple file access to the saved pictures would be adequate, but synchronization with iPhoto would be even better.