Firewire external drives?

Do any of you use firewire external hard drives? I have a USB 2.0 back up hard drive and it's much too slow.

Are the firewire external drives much faster

Also which one do you have or recommend?

Yes, much faster. I bought an enclosure and put my own drives in.

Firewire 400 is a bit faster. FW 800 a lot.
eSata is faster still...

My main photo drive is an external FW. It seems plenty fast for me. My backup drive is USB2.

eSata is the way to go hands down. I just built a 1tb eSata external for under $200 ....Jeff

1TB Hard Drive
Enclosure

jmik26 wrote in post #6452930
eSata is the way to go hands down. I just built a 1tb eSata external for under $200 ....Jeff

1TB Hard Drive
Enclosure

Nice. I did a 2TB eSATA array for about $310.

Does firewire 800 vs 400 refer to the type of connection my computer has? I have a firewire connection, but am not sure what type it is. Or does the 800 vs 400 refer to the external memory transfer speed itself? In that case I won't have to worry since I have a firewire port anyway correct?

Yup it is the external port; they have different connectors. If you have Firewire 800 on your PC, you can get a 400 to 800 cable but not the other way around.

http://en.wikipedia.or​g/wiki/FireWire

honestly, for external storage it mostly depends on the controller's ability to actually DELIVER on the standard it's supposedly rated for.

... and on the ability of the box you connect to it, to deliver on your drive's read/write performance, and on the amount of caching it offers.

With the majority of USB/Firewire/eSata boxes you can connect to your computer, the standard used for connectivity isn't the bottleneck at all. It's the drives themselves, and/or the RAID controller employed to run them.

400MB/sec is heaps more than a couple of cheap drives and a $10 RAID controller can handle.... so using firewire 800 isn't going to give you any benefit whatsoever.

The only time you might notice, is if your REALLY EXCELLENT storage box is connected to a very cheap and crappy firewire 400 port, which only really manages to give you 50meg/sec... so upgrading to an equally crappy firewire 800 which gives you 150meg/sec brings on a dramatic improvement.

These numbers you're given in specs are asymptotes. There's a reason that top shelf storage costs so VERY VERY much more than the crap you're using, even though they supposedly use the same technology.

FW-800 works well, especially with Apple gear. IIRC, the last time I bought a FW-400 card for a PC, I paid about $20. FW-400 connector looks like a little boat; FW-800 is squarish. FW-800 is downward compatible to FW-400; i.e. you can get a cable to run a FW-400 device from a FW-800 port.


For single drives through arrays, check out: http://www.wiebetech.c​om/. Pricey, but absolutely the best quality and service. For a Raid-1 solution, check out this one: http://www.newertech.c​om/products/gmax.php. Been using one of those for the last year.