On 30/09/2010 12:57, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Wed, 29 Sep 2010 20:05:46 -0400) it happened Jamie
t wrote in
:

And why would that be? In this case, a parallel port moves 8 bits at a
time compared with 1 for USB. The drive can cache as much as it wants
and in a flat out race, USB would always loose.

It's all about marketing.. Saving copper etc...

Not exactly, apart from the par port being 8 MHz only,
it would be very difficult to do high speed in a multipair screened cable.
Screened, with about 16 lines, makes a big fat cable, with many pF
capacitance between pairs and signal and ground.
100 KHz would be next to impossible over more then 1 meter.

3 wire handshake and IEEE488 (originally HPIB/GPIB) was good for around
1Mb/s bulk transfer rate if you were careful, and about 1/3rd of that if
you were not. It is an ancient HP specification dating back to 1975. You
could certainly have cable runs of a few metres working at nearly full
speed (off label). Stacked GPIB connectors would sometimes pull smaller
kit off a table by their physical weight and very stiff cables.

Still in use for some instrumentation but now largely replaced by
Ethernet or USB. One clear advantage was that the GPIB connectors are
chunky enough to survive the rough and tumble in industrial test
environments. According to Wiki NI introduced HS-488 which is allegedly
good for up to 8Mbyte/s in 2003 (never used it though).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE-488

(and that would be only 800 kB / s), less if you count control sequences.
I have a very old, very good webcam that uses the parport, 3 fps is the maximum for a
uncompressed 320x280 frame.


It's easy to convince people that a good method is not
good by simply not implementing a faster version of it and
instead, make a single wire system that uses less material and
say it's better technology..

This is true, but does not apply to the par port idea.
That is why we have USB and firewire.
Also why we have PCIE, serial links win at high speed.
Not to mention composite video over 50 Ohms coax, and what not.


Sheep and lambs. what a herding., that's it!

Yea, but you forget market forces.
Else we would still be using ISA....

Just imagine my 1TB external Seagate connected with a huge fat parallel cable...
About as thick as that screened parallel IDE one.
Not very practical.

External SCSI did it that way for a while. And in the early days when
USB stood for Unstable Serial Bus the more expensive Firewire gear had
the edge. The best advice for the OP is to select something that likes
roughly the same quality media as the DVD writer he already has. Might
also be worth considering a BlueRay unit to get twice the capacity.

Regards,
Martin Brown