FireWire ?

Hey all

Could someone please tell me what FireWire is exactly (Specs i.e. speed)... i got am idea but, i got to know so that i can deceide if i am to get an external Hard Drive that uses it or not.

Thanks
Womma

if you're looking for speed, don't bother with an external firewire HD. It's at least an order slower than the IDE interface.

Firewire transfers at 400Mbps, if everything is perfect. That's only equal to roughly 50MBps. Remember, there is a factor of eight difference between Mbps and MBps! Bits versus bytes.

IDE bandwidth on modern motherboards is 133MBps.

The drives themselves, however, can usually only burst around 40MBps. So unless you have multiple drives, or do a LOT of data transfer, you'll probably see no real speed difference. At least, assuming the Firewire translator on that 1394 drive does not eat away at it's bandwidth, and works as advertised

Thanks man... my plan is to use it as a back-up systerm for music etc

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