Do Native Firewire Hard Drives Exist?

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?"

Why not...

[Tower]

Just get SCSI. Gets rid of your IDE bottleneck, performance can be as good as you'll ever find, and it is widely available. Not as flexible as 1394 (no hot plug and all that), but a good solution for drives.

Firewire is really neat stuff (tough to get for PCs, though), but I really haven't seen a lot for it except for Sony digital cameras.

IDE is not the bottleneck

[blaster]

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

Haiku?

[Tower]

FireWire Can Be Fun
Expandable and Easy
USB Cowers

Re:IDE is not the bottleneck

[MikeBabcock]

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

Re:Haiku?

[Wise Dragon]

The trouble with Haiku is that it's so hard to tell good Haiku from bad Haiku.....

Not too tough

[Tower]

Oh, it's easy... if I wrote it, it's almost definitely very bad haiku... hence the '?' ;-)

Does the Western Digital drive count?

[Guy Harris]

Western Digital has an external disk drive [westerndigital.com] 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.

Re:Why not...

[BlubberBoy]

Just get SCSI. Gets rid of your IDE bottleneck, performance can be as good as you'll ever find and it is widely available. Not as flexible as 1394 (no hot plug and all that), but a good solution for drives.

This is not true - there are plenty of hot-swappable SCSI devices on the market, and they've been around for a long time. I believe most of these devices use an SCA-80 pin connector, which is power and data in one. Typically used in RAID cabinets where data is striped across multiple hard drives. If one of them fails you can rip it out of the chassis, throw it over your shoulder, and slap a new one in without powering down. You can then run a recovery program to rebuild the data on the drive based on parity information.

ADSTech conversion

[Omega996]

Does anyone have any experience with ADS Tech's IDE-Firewire enclosure? I recently acquired (ok, someone gave it to me)a Maxtor 40GB 7.2K IDE drive, and I was interested in perhaps putting it in a Firewire enclosure.

1394 drive vendor...

[jasongrim]

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.

Re:ADSTech conversion

[Yardley]

I believe http://xlr8yourmac.com/ [xlr8yourmac.com]has reviews of various FireWire enclosures, including the ADS Tech http://xlr8yourmac.com/firewire /firewire_case_kits/ [xlr8yourmac.com].

--