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Do Native Firewire Hard Drives Exist?

Posted by Cliff on from the in-search-of....better-technology dept.

toph42 asks: "I am impressed by the technology of the IEEE 1394 interface, but I am disappointed at the performance of the hard drives I have seen. I need to find a hard drive that leaves out the IDE bottleneck and attaches to Firewire natively, without an IDE bridge. Does such a thing exist?"

4 of 11 comments (clear)

  1. IDE is not the bottleneck by blaster · · Score: 3

    Trust me, I dislike IDE as much as the next man, but in this case it is not the bottleneck

    The current IDE-Firewire bridges are. They are all buggy, and can only run in PIO Mode 4, which limits the drives to around 16 megs a second. I imagine that next generation bridges should fix that.

    While the latest greatest drives are currently SCSI, from an economic standpoint an IDE drive with an IDE-Firewire bridge is about as good as you will currently do in terms of features/cost for external an drive.

    As for native firewire drives, there none currently. I believe quantum has stated they will be making some available in the future, and since MacWorld seems like a logical place for firewire announcements, this statemnet might be wrong in a few hours.

    Hope that is helpful.

    Louis

    1. Re:IDE is not the bottleneck by MikeBabcock · · Score: 2

      A 'native' firewire drive is most likely going to be an IDE drive with the IDE->Firewire conversion hardware onboard.

      --
      - Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
  2. Does the Western Digital drive count? by Guy+Harris · · Score: 2

    Western Digital has an external disk drive with an IEEE 1394 interface. I don't know whether it's an IDE drive with an IDE1394 bridge inside, or a drive whose native interface is 1394.

  3. 1394 drive vendor... by jasongrim · · Score: 2

    If you haven't already, check out http://www.vsttech.com/ for external firewire drives. They work with both Windows and Mac OS, I can't speak for any others personally.