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May 12, 2005

IP Over FireWire

One of the non-sexy features in Mac OS X is a little thing called "IP over FireWire."

Without getting too geeky, this feature allows you to use FireWire cables (which run at speeds of 400 or 800 megabit, or millions of bits per second) to connect one or more computers to one another. You can then share files, printers, and the like very easily.

This is way, way, way, way cool.

Here's my application. Periodically, I want to work on some large file on my Sony Vaio laptop. Since my PowerBook is my primary machine, that often means I'm taking the file from the PowerBook and transferring it to the Vaio. As long as the file is 128 MB or less (the size of my USB keychain drive), there's no problem - I just copy the file to the keychain on the Mac, and then plug the keychain in to the PC and go.

However, for larger files (say, a half-gigabyte video clip or something) the keychain won't work. Instead, I need to copy the file from one machine to the other using the house wireless network. And, since I'm limited to 802.11b on the Vaio, that means I run at a theoretical speed of 11 megabits. Often, I get a more realistic speed of 5 megabit or so. And big files take a loooooong time to transfer at 5 million bits per second.

IP over FireWire changes this. Dramatically.

So I currently have my FireWire cable running from my Mac to an external hard drive. All I did was - wait for it - run a cable from the back of this hard drive to my PC. I then set a couple IP addresses in XP and Mac OS X, and turned on sharing.

I was able to copy 2.1 gigabytes in about 5 minutes.
This rocks!

Posted by Gavin Shearer at May 12, 2005 8:42 PM. Posted to Apple.

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