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FireWire external drives: still more info

FireWire external drives: still more info

CNET staff
2 min read
Continuing from yesterday's coverage of external FireWire drives:

Granite Digital FireWire/IDE bridge Mark Moorcroft comments about the new Granite Digital FireWire bridge (mentioned yesterday): "As of Macworld Expo, Granite Digital was the only vendor using the new Oxford semiconducter chip set that functions at 40MBs. So it's likely that most, if not all, other current FireWire cases do not yet use this. However, they offer a bridge board only, so you can retrofit an existing enclosure. And, they have just announced the availability of a firmware update that allows the bridge to support two ATA devices (sharing the 40MB bandwidth) as well as ATAPI devices (e.g., CD-RW, DVD). My IBM Deskstar tripled in speed when I installed it in a Granite enclosure." Mark did note an extension conflict when Granite and VST extensions were used at the same time (for two different drives). He was also unable to boot from the drive in the Granite case when running Mac OS 9.1; it worked when using Mac OS 9.0.4.

FireWire Depot comments Jeff Chasick (of FireWire Depot) offers these replies to yesterday's article:

  • The boards that Granite Digital are promoting are based on the new Oxford 911 chipset. These new chips do make a difference. They should be available in quantity towards mid-late April when you will see most manufacturers switch over to them. They will have the largest impact on 3.5" enclosures/drives since the rpm of these mechanisms is greater than that of 2.5" drives. Our tests using our enclosures, a sample of the new bridgeboard, and an IBM 75 GXP 7200 rpm drive produced speeds around 30MB.
  • Drive Setup will not work with FireWire drives. You need to use Hard Disk Speed Tools, FWB, Radiologic or the free Heat Utilities.
  • 3.5" mechanisms do require more power than the bus can provide for drive spin up so except for MO drives, all 3.5" and 5.25" enclosures require self power.

Drive Setup 1.9.2 works? Robert Robinson claims (we have not been able to confirm this as yet) that Drive Setup 1.9.2 (the version that came with Mac OS 9.0) will recognize a FireWire drive, but the 2.0.3 version included with Mac OS 9.1 will not. He adds: "With Apple's Drive Setup 1.9.2, I reinitialized a Maxtor 80GB FW drive to have four partitions. With the FireWire 2.7 extensions from OS 9.1, I can boot from or mount the drive without needing the Maxtor extensions."