FireWire cases and ATA drives: another follow-up

Drive setup We could not get Apple's Drive Setup to recognize an externally attached FireWire drive. Bob Unger concurs, but adds that Hard Disk Speed Tools will recognize and format such drives.

Bus power We were pleased to be able to run our drive from bus power - without any external power source. However, Barry Levine claims that bus power is likely not sufficient for 3.5" drives. Despite what the drive case's manual implies, we should use an AC adapter. It is only 2.5" drives that are designed to work with bus power. Barry may be right. While we were successful in mounting the drive with bus power, our success was intermittent. Sometimes, the drive would spin up when turned on; other times it would not. The good news: if it did spin up, it always mounted and remained accessible. That is, we never lost access to a drive in the middle of working with it.

Build your own FireWire Depot has a web page on "How to custom build your own hard drive." A reader was told by FireWire Depot: "All of our 2.5 enclosures are bus powerable on the FireWire bus (based on the fact that you are connecting to a built-in FireWire port and not a Cardbus card - as you are aware, Cardbus does not provide bus power) - the DF2.5FU requires external power for USB, the SK2.5FU is bus powerable on both FireWire and USB ports."

FireWire/IDE bridge Before purchasing a FireWire case, Anthony Burokas suggests checking whether it uses the "newer FireWire/IDE bridge system announced by Granite Digital at MWSF01 that allows external FireWire cases to make full use of the IDE drive's speed. Other cases may top out at 11-13 MB. The new systems are supposed to offer over 40MB. If you don't know what bridge is in use, try a disk utility to test the throughput/speed of the drive. I use Formedia which came with my ClubMac drives. It's nearly identical to VST's software. They have an option for testing the speed of a drive." [Note: We have not checked this on our case as yet.]