[kupan787]

Do any of these beasts exist? If so, where could I find them? I have been searching online for awhile now, and can only find external drives, and pci cars that give me a internal firewire port.

I think it would be really cool if I could find an internal firewire drive to plug into my port. Or is the idea that I plug in an slim external firewire drive into that port? Would anything be wrong with that?

Thanks for an pointers.
Ben

[Aykew]

I don't think any of these exist... but to tell you the truth, I can't imagine a situation where anyone would want to do it like that. External firewire drives are basically power supplies and interfaces for standard 3.5" desktop or 2.5" laptop IDE hard drives. They aren't any faster than installing an internal IDE hard drive, and depending on your setup may be significantly slower.

If your IDE chain is full, it'd be much cheaper to add an internal IDE drive with an IDE card than buying an external firewire drive. Of course, the main advantage of firewire IS that it's external. Than means you have an easily modular storage device you can take with you!

[kupan787]

Is firewire not faster than IDE? I currently have two internal IDE drives, and the DVD/CD-rw is (I am assuming) ide. So I am not sure how many more IDE drives I can add.

My thought for the internal firewire drive was that it would be hotswapable, and much faster than another IDE drive (since the IDE drives are on the same chain, wouldn't copying one file to the other be slower than copying from IDE to firewire?)

If no internal firewire drives exist, what is the current fastest firewire drive available (real world speed) 400Mbps translates to roughly how many MB's/sec?

Thanks

[Arty50]

There's no point in internal Firewire drives other than you can hook more than two up to the bus. As mentioned before, there are no native Firewire drives on the market. All current Firewire HDs are really IDE HDs with an IDE-to-Firewire bridge/converter. So until native Firewire drives are made, there's no point. Also, how do you go about hotswapping an internal drive in a G4 tower?

[SkiBikeSki]

The fastest firewire drive you can buy is the Mercury Elite from OWC. I boasts sustained transfers of 30MB/s. It uses the new Oxford 911 IDE to Firewire bridge to attain that speed. The acuall drive inside is, for most sizes, an IBM 60GXP. When set to master on an IDE bus the 60GXP performs at 41MB/z sustained. The bridge is what causes the loss of speed, and no one makes a native firewire drive since it isn't very cost effective, since only Macintosh users and video editors use firewire. Maybe in the future with Windows XP's adoption of the IEEE 1394 standard, we'll see some real firewire drives. I hope this answers most questions.

[kupan787]

Also, how do you go about hotswapping an internal drive in a G4 tower?

Well, since the G4 can be run open (the side door), I figured that if Firewire is hotswapable, and since the G4 can be run open, I could then do some hotswapping.

Why are native firewire drives not cost effective? If people are buying firewire drives today, those people would buy native firewire drives, so how would a company loose any money? How fast would a native firewire drive be? how about a native firewire drive that ran on a firewire bus of 800 Mbps, or 1600 Mbps?

Thanks,
Ben

[scarab]

Well to reply to the post above, won't it be better to run FireWire drives connected to the ports outside? Most FireWire drives have 2 FireWire ports on them so you can just daisy-chain.

[Paul S]

As much as we'd love to see it, there just isn't enough demand for native FireWire drives. Most people are buying them for video. DV only requires about 4MB/s, so even the fastest FW drives are more than enough to handle it. It's cheaper right now to use existing IDE/ATA drives and bridge them. If you ask me, FW is still the way to go because of portability and the ease of upgrading to another machine. Just plug it into the new one and you're ready to go. Or, in my case, if you have multiple machines. I can transfer large DV files from one machine to the next far faster than my 100Mbs network can. I do this on a very regualr basis and it works great. Compressing finished video on one machine while editing more on the other.

On another topic brought up here, don't run your machine open. It can work yes. That's mostly so technicians can read the diagnosic LEDs on the board while the machine is on. If you have any temperature gagues or software that handles that, you will notice that your processor will run significantly hotter when the case is open. This is because the CPU fan isn't drawing air directly over the heat sink. With the case open in a room with little air movement, the heat doesn't dissipate as quickly, causing the processor to overheat.

[Vsx1]

A few thoughts and questions:
What's a native FW drive?
As for 400/800 MB/s that's bus speed not the actual HD moving data at that rate. This high number comes in handy when you have multiple drives/devices, that way if 4 HDs are sending 50MB/s, that becomes 200MB/s and the bus can handle it (no bottlenecking?).

[BLAZE_MkIV]

Right now all firewire hard drives and CD drives are a standard off the shelf devides with a brigde. So theres the drive itself with the spinning platters then theres a controler stuck to the bottom be it IDE or SCSI than they put that into an enclosure with some ciruitry that translates between the controller and the firewire bus. In a native drive the controller on the bottom of the drive would be firewire and you'd connect it directly to the bus. Is the cheeper? On a unit by unit basis yes. But design the controller then split off a fraction of the assebly line and put the different controller of the bottom would cost more than the extra the bridge costs unless you can get the volumn up enough.