I am highly perturbed. I bought a firewire encasing from ADS Technologies and couldn't even get the darn thing to work. I tried it with four different hard drives, most of them pretty new including the one that came with my new G4. Finally after hours of tinkering with the thing, I got it to work with a really old conner hard drive that was only 1.2GB. Why did it work with a really old HD and not with a new one? And yes, I did have them all set to master. Anyway, I got it to work with an old hard drive, but then later on it wouldn't work again, then it would work, then it wouldn't. This isn't even my main beef. My main beef is that finally when I did get it to work, it wasn't even all that fast. As a matter of fact, my IBM Deskstar IDE drive booting and loading games wooped the pants off of it. I really don't see what all of the hoopla is all about with firewire speed wise. Sure you can hook up 120 somethin peripherals, but is it really likely you're going to do that? Let's be real. When it comes to chaining multiple devices, I give it to firewire, but for a fast HD, next time i'm going SCSI. 160 MB/s VS. 50 MB/s. SCSI wins hands down.

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Jamil

My Computer's a beast!

Sorry to hear of your trouble.

If you got what it takes upstairs to put together your own FireWire hard drive, albeit from a glorified kit.. Then you should also know that it's not going to be any faster than any other non-firewire hard drive. Why? Because it's not a genuine FireWire drive! IE, All FireWire drives are actually IDE/SCSI based so how can you expect them to be faster? In fact, as you found, they will probably be slower due to the extra technology/gubbins involved in getting them to work. No surprises there then..

As for the drives themselves not working in your enclosure.. But lots of other people using these forums seem to get them to work with little or no problems. So perhaps your FireWire enclosure is faulty? Or perhaps there are compatability issues with Apple or certain drives.

Don't rule out FireWire because of the problems you have experienced.. It's still new technology compared with SCSI, so some people are bound to experience problems. This asside, it's actually a very good format! Works well for me anyway..

Not that you wish to hear this, but I've used a Maxtor DiamondMax 27.2 GB drive and a Quantum 10 GB drive from my iMacDV in the ADS Pyro case. Yes, the transfer rate is not great, but for pure back-up and MP3 playback, it's more than adequate.

For DV work, you'd need SCSI or ATA--at least from what I've read and found.

New FW cases were announced last week that have ATA100 controllers in them so real world speeds from FW drives will soon be 40MB/s instead of around 12MB/s. While UltraSCSI might be 160MB/s, what's the real transfer rate? Those drives can't sustain that speed, it's only the theoretical limit of the connection. Real world speed for UltraSCSI might be in the 50's or so, but for how much more money than FW? FireWire is really inexpensive. It's hot swappable, and will now finally be able to sustain high speeds good enough for most power users. I would chalk it up to a problem with that case and return it. Wait for the new ones to start shipping, and then save a ton of money on the SCSI drive you could have bought.

Paul S,

Thanks for insight but I highly disagree with you. Tests show that Ultra2 wide SCSI 160 actually does transfer 160MB/s. The design on SCSI HDs is what seperates them from IDE in every respect.I recommend checking out western digital's site for more info. There are many different SCSIs so you might have confused them. Some such as Ultra Wide SCSI does 50MB/s, Ultra2 Wide SCSI does 80 MB/s, and Ultra2 SCSI 160 does 160 MB/s. Like I said before, when it comes to having muliple devices chained together on one system, FW takes it. But, for a fast internal HD,nothing can fade SCSI. As they are working on FW HDs that do 800Mbps (100MB) , SCSI 320 in the works too. It costs more because SCSI 160s are mainly used in high end servers where speed is crucial, while FW can only make a descent backup storage device

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Jamil

My Computer's a beast!