Western Digital plans to introduce an external 80 GB FireWire hard drive at next week's Macworld Expo in New York, MacNN has learned. The new drive will sport a 7200 RPM spin speed, and feature all of the plug and play capabilities standard for FireWire devices.
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You can buy a 80 gig firewire hard drive when you visit the Microcenter stores right now! Western Digital's announcement isn't new at all! I believe it is Maxtor that has the drive out already. No big deal, its just a external firewire hard drive for PC or Mac.
Maxtor drives are 5400 RPM. WDs are 7200. This is definately new for Western Digital, though some other company probably has 7200 80 gigers.
Its quite useless though, everyone shold be buying drives that have a Oxford 911 interface or similar, as that is the performance king right now. I wonder what interface its using?
Not Me
What is it with all these geeky hobbyists on these forums who always think that anything which isn't the latest and greatest must be "quite useless"?
If you buy a new toy, it might as well be "the latest and greatest". I mean these things are not cheap, so I don't want to buy something new that is already outdated. (Horrifying thought : and bought today at yesterday's higher price !) If you are going to give your money to someone else, it might as well be to get something that won't be completely outdated the very next day. If not today.
This being said, what I already have is OK. Even though it is not "the latest and greatest", it is good enough for me. I don't mind if the objects in my home aren't "the latest and greatest" : I've bought them long ago and they do what I expect them to do.
It's not about "the latest and greatest" matter. If you don't know the sustained transfer rate of your internal ATA drive, then, you don't need to care.
Only new Oxford 911 firewire-IDE bridge allows stable DV capturing and outputting on external firewire drive. This is the critical factor especially for the laptop that has limited internal HD capacity.
Oxford 911 bridge really makes laptop as a viable solution for DV editing.
Already, several small companies are providing proved performance and reliability. AND... not expenxive at all... Big companies may want to squeeze out more profit by using older type of bridges. They will spend more for marketing and it will reward them more money. Don't be a victim of them.
By the way, without this DV editing case, older bridge would be practical enough.
Western Digital has been working on a native 1394 drive for about a year before Maxtor purchased them. I am hoping for the native version. Rather than some cheesey bridge.
If it really happens, it would be the news!
Don't think so...
Current Oxford 911 bridge demonstrated the speed no less than the native ATA bus.
If native firewire interface will provide the speed of the next generation firewire speed fully, that would be really a huge leap. That means we will get the hard drive which speed is equal to the current mid-speed RAID, that is around 60 ~ 80 MB/sec. Combining only two of them will achieve the speed very close to the high-end fiber-channel RAID. I will be extremely happy with it.
And... that would be too good to be true... Sometimes, it happens though, like new iBook.;-)
I've had a couple of WD drives die on me, and I stopped using them.
That was several years ago, though. Anyone want to comment on their reliability today?
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i love firewire
it's a Godsend. Unfortunately, I'm bald now because I tore out all my hair troubleshooting all my scsi s*** a few years ago.
and im not going to say anything about a first post.
;o)