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FireWire Hard Drives - Guide
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| Speed: | Up to 100 MB/sec (800Mbits/sec) |
| Capacity: | 20GB - 500GB |
| Portability: | Low |
| Interface: | FireWire 400 or 800 ports |
| Price: | Start at $140 |
| Installation: | FireWire Cable required |
FireWire external hard drives are probably the second common today because many current laptops come with 1 FireWire port built-in. The speed of the data transfer for the FireWire Hard Drives depends on the FireWire interface type.
See transfer rate comparison chart in FireWire ports guide.
The
lower-speed FireWire 400 has a transfer rate of 400Mbits/sec that is equivalent to 50MB/sec, and is the
most common interface on FireWire hard drives. Good to use for storage and to back-up data.
The hi-speed FireWire 800 interface allows transfer rates up to 100MB/sec, and enables the fastest external hard drives available (besides the SATA hard drives). These drives can be ideal for storing uncompressed digital movies, audio and photographs, playing music and games.
Example: if your hard drive size is 60GB then theoretically it'll take 60,000MB / 100MB/sec = 10 min to transfer your entire internal drive to a FireWire 800 external drive. (In reality, the actual transfer rate is about 70MB/s or 70-66% of the maximum interface rate).
The FireWire port is marked by one of these two symbols. At least one port can be found on many current laptops:
Laptops manufactured before 1999 do not include FireWire.
Most of the low-end laptops except Sony are not equipped with FireWire ports. The FireWire ports on laptops are
mainly FireWire 400.
If your laptop is not equipped with a FireWire 400 port, or you'd like to connect a twice faster FireWire 800 hard drive than you would need to get an appropriate PCMCIA adapter card. Simply plug your FireWire (800 or 400) CardBus Adapter card into an empty PCMCIA type II slot.
See an example of a FireWire 800 CardBus Adapter.
FireWire Hard Drives offer the second most affordable storage solutions for laptops. On average, they cost slightly more than the same capacity USB drives.
FireWire hard drives tend to have more capacity because of the high speed. They often come as FireWire/USB combo drives for convenience.
This table presents the most common capacities for the FireWire Hard Drives and their average prices:
| Capacity | Price, US$ | *Notice that portable drives have less capacity but are more expensive. **FireWire 800 are twice faster, have twice more capacity, and priced twice higher. |
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| FireWire 400 | |||
| 60GB | 150 | ||
| 80GB | 160 | ||
| 120GB | 160 | ||
| 200GB | 300 | ||
| Portable FireWire 400 / USB 2.0 Combo* | |||
| 60GB 3.5" | 185 | ||
| 80GB 3.5" | 240 | ||
| 120GB 3.5" | 250 | ||
| 30GB 2.5" | 190 | ||
| 60GB 2.5" | 300 | ||
| FireWire 800 / USB 2.0 Combo** | |||
| 400GB | 650 | ||
| 500GB | 800 | ||
The real advantages are in getting the FireWire 800 drives: much higher capacity and speed for slightly higher prices than USB 2.0.
The 500GB FireWire hard drive lets you store two days of digital video from DV camcorders, or the equivalent of 100 DVD-Video discs (MPEG-2).
High capacity FireWire hard drives are ideal for archiving image databases, large desktop publishing files, and editing digital audio and uncompressed digital video.
FireWire hard drives are Plug & Play, and require no software installation for Windows XP.
The FireWire 800 is backward compatible, meaning that FireWire 800 drive will still operate via the FireWire 400 port. There are two types of FireWire 400 ports: 6-pin and 4-pin, so to connect a FireWire 800 drive to a FireWire 400 port, a specific adapter cable must be used.
Do not throw out your old internal hard drive - you can easily convert it into an external FireWire 400 hard drive.
First, get a portable external FireWire hard drive kit. See an example here > Many kits provide IDE to FireWire 400 and IDE to USB 2.0 conversion in one kit - combo kits, and support 5.25", 3.5" and 2.5" sized IDE internal drives (make sure you're getting the right kit size).
Then, insert your internal IDE hard drive into the enclosure, close the cover... Done.
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