Using external IDE drive and Firewire

[James G]

I have heard about Firewire and how you can attach hard drives.

I haven't seen them but I think you can get enclosures which will hold an
IDE hard drive and you can plug that into your PC.

If I am right the advantage is that you can easily swap the drive between
system but the disadvatange is that you can't boot from the drive.

Is all this correct?

Also can someone tell me what the effective or real transfer rate is using
Firewire when compared to using the usual internal parallel ATA cables. Is
the Firewire (nominally 50 or 100 Mbps) approximately as fast as 100 MHz
IDE/ATA in real life?

Can the same sort of setup of an external hard drive be done with USB 2.0?

 

[Rod Speed]

I have heard about Firewire and how you can attach hard drives.

I haven't seen them but I think you can get enclosures which
will hold an IDE hard drive and you can plug that into your PC.

If I am right the advantage is that you can easily swap the drive between
system but the disadvatange is that you can't boot from the drive.

Is all this correct?

Yes. But if the drive is USB2 instead of firewire, you can often boot
from the drive, depending on the capability of the motherboard in the PC.

And quite a few of those enclosures support both USB2 and firewire.

Also can someone tell me what the effective or real transfer rate is using
Firewire when compared to using the usual internal parallel ATA cables.

Its not quite as good, but the difference isnt huge.

Is the Firewire (nominally 50 or 100 Mbps)
approximately as fast as 100 MHz IDE/ATA in real life?

Its not quite as good, but the difference isnt huge.

Can the same sort of setup of an external
hard drive be done with USB 2.0?

Yes, and you can often boot from those.
These are significantly slower than firewire tho.

So there is a bit of a tradeoff between speed
and being able to boot off the external drive.

But you can use both quite a bit of the time, use USB2 when
you need to boot off the drive, use firewire when you dont.

http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/supergeek/jump/0,24331,3393574,00.html

 

[Lil' Dave]

To date, firewire is not bootable as far as I know. Don't matter the device
type.

Yes, a standard, run-of-the-mill ide hard drive goes in the enclosure. In
most cases, you can remove the hard drive and use it on your ribbon cable if
the enclosure fails. Food for thought: You can put an operating system on
the hard drive if you like before putting the drive in the enclosure, it
just won't boot on the firewire.

Firewire is a tad faster than USB2 due to USB2's overhead. I've never timed
my Firewire drive's throughput in read or write. I was initally surprised
at its write speed. Inside the enclosure is a short ide ribbon cable, molex
power connector, power converter, and firewire to ide convertor circuit
board. Some may even have a small fan (good idea).
Dave