"USB can not compete with FireWire simply by virtue of it being a host/slave paradigm and relying on the CPU."
We haven't really seen what USB 3.0 says about that yet. That didn't stop adoption of USB 2.0, though. These days there is a lot of CPU to spare, often in multiple cores, so even though using CPU is a bad thing the drawbacks of using the CPU may not be big enough to justify using something else.
"eSATA I never understood. eSATA isn't meant for hot-swapping since it has to reassign hardware addresses every time you plug and unplug the device."
Actually eSATA is designed for hot swapping. Hardware reassignment is in fact what makes it possible, as it can be re-plugged into a new computer, which may have the address already assigned to another device. It needs to have that ability in order to work without conflicts.
Being able to reassign addresses and IRQs and all of that stuff is what makes hot swapping and plug and play possible. Nobody wants to go back to the old ways of manually setting addresses and dealing with conflicts because some device stubbornly doesn't want to change its address. It has to be dynamic to be hot swappable.
"You also can't daisy-chain eSATA like you can with Firewire."
Because it is meant for drives, not for general device handling. It doesn't make sense to daisy chain drives.
Discussion on:
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