10/Mar/2021

It's impressive[ly dumb] how to this day we still don't have a solution that is as simple and direct as FireWire was to connect machines and drives

USB relies on a dumb master-slave way where only one device can be the accessed drive and the other the command, so you can't simply connect two computers together and have them just be able to access one another's files no questions asked (maybe besides passwords).

Also you can't have daisy chained devices, only RAID devices or connection forwarding, which is less malleable and practical as if you have to connect 5 drives, you need your computer to have 5 ports, or use a splitter, that will still need to split the bandwidth of the port with 5 drives.

"But you can just network the devices"

Networking requires having to set up the servers/clients on each machine, which in most OSs is not straightforward, then have them connected on the same network that also has to be set up, and good luck doing that on these new laptops without an Ethernet port; All I want is to plug a cable between two machines and have them be able to work with the other's drives, I don't want to have to bother with SAMBA, FTP, SSH or whatever just to move a few files once.

Please bring us a standard protocol that is anywhere close to FireWire in quality.