By WILSON ROTHMAN
Attention back-up freaks, high-tech commuters, intrepid PC tinkerers and Mac geeks: have you driven a FireWire 800 drive lately? Not long ago, Apple started shipping its Power Mac G5 towers with strange new ports in the back. They looked like what might happen if USB and Ethernet had a love child. These ports were, yep, FireWire 800, an accessory interface that was supposed to be twice as fast as the FireWire 400 (aka 1394 or iLink) seen today on camcorders, external drives and iPods, and twice as fast as High-Speed USB 2.0 as well. Since Apple's relatively quiet roll-out, a number of external hard-drive makers have introduced models to take advantage of the new speeds. Iomega's new 7200 rpm triple-interface drive is one of several that give you a choice: you can connect it to your computer using USB, old FireWire or the new FireWire 800.
Will you really notice a difference in speed? These days, with RAM regularly being upped beyond a gigabyte, and chip speeds reaching astronomical heights, it's often impossible to spot the advantages these amped-up specs offer, especially when most often you're just online surfing the Web or checking e-mail, and the most demanding thing you ever ask of your processor is to crop a high-resolution JPEG. But if you're moving a folder of hi-res JPEGs to a separate drive for back-up or sharing, you'll see your copying time cut nearly in half.
With the Iomega drive connected to a dual-processor Power Mac G5 via FireWire 800, I could move a GB of data in 20 seconds. With the same set-up, connected instead via the older FireWire 400, it took 36 seconds, and a lagging 77 seconds using USB 2.0. (The same test, using a Maxtor 7200 rpm drive FireWire Connection, resulted in a 33-second transfer) If you're moving hours of home video or digital music, or you just like backing up whole chunks of your system onto a separate drive, this difference could free up hours of your computer's life.
If you have a G5 tower with FireWire 800, then there's really no point not going for the maximum speed. Macs have always had the ability to boot-up from an external drive, so if you're migrating from an older Mac to a new one, or work on different Macs at different times of the day or week, you can make yourself a little personal nest on one of these drives and boot away, never worrying that you may be losing speed by running everything from an outside source.
If you're a Windows PC user and, admit it, are either jealous of or completely baffled by this whole revolution, there's some good news. PC Mall sells an adapter card for as little as $60. If you have a newer PC, you still won't be able to run your whole computer from an external hard drive, but you will be able to edit video and stream music from it without worrying about the hiccups or delays that usually betray a data bottleneck.
For a good, nerdy study on the subject, have a look at this article from Tom's Hardware.
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