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urrl5201 · May 29, 2003, 12:27 PM

Just got a 7200 RPM 120 GIG HD with 8 MB buffer RAM; the new 800 firewire series from transintl.com for $259 U.S.

I also have an old stock Ti 20 GIG HD in an ordinary firewire case from the same company.

According to my calculations dragging a quicktime file to the old firewire drive took about 8 seconds to transfer while the new 120 GIG HD took only 5 seconds. That's a noticible improvement; about 37.5% faster. Unfortunately you must plug the 120 GIG HD into a wall to get it to work; not so with the smaller 20 GIG exterior HD with "ordinary" firewire. So keep that in mind. I don't know if the new Lacie firewire 800 series require you to plug them in; I would guess probably so.

chipchen · May 29, 2003, 12:41 PM

Umm.. I think you're talking about the difference of drive size more than the difference of FireWire.

If the drives are the portable ones using the 2.5 inch laptop drives, they consume little enough power to be bus powered by the FireWire bus.

But if the drives are standard 3.5 inch, in an enclosure, they require an additional source of power.

This is true with FireWire 400 and 800.

For FireWire 800 drives without needing an additional power supply, look at CMS external harddrives. The line they have using portable 2.5inch drives require no external power supply. (but remember, laptop drives currently max out at 80GB, and that just came out)

iDaver · May 30, 2003, 08:53 AM

What do you think of the overall quality of the drive? Is it quiet? I'm considering the same one. Thanks.

urrl5201 · May 30, 2003, 10:39 AM

I am capturing video flawlessly to it right now. It is very quiet. I can finally save all of my important work on one hard drive. I must have captured about 15 GIG worth of video segments so far without a hitch using Final Cut Express while playing the DV from a Canon GL2 cam. No more HD space worries for me.

lawrenceg · Jun 1, 2003, 02:59 PM

I've been thinking about getting an external drive as I do a lot of photoshop work with large files. How do the transfer speeds compare to the internal drive. Will I get much of an improvement with an external drive if I transfer my scratch disk to it?