Are you looking for a storage device which is not only external but can transfer at faster speeds than before? Well you may just need the new Firewire 800 types of external hard drives! These types of hard drives work on third generation firewire technology, otherwise and technically known as IEEE 1394b, which offers a substantially faster rate of transfer of about 100 MB of data per second. From testing of one particular hard drive of this kind, the Lacie D2 drive, which has 200 GB of storage space, results look very solid. The firewire 800 drives transfer at double the rate of the older firewire 400 drives, which used to move data at 50 MB per second. They also transfer data at a much faster rate than USB 2.0, which clocked in at 60 MB per second.

The areas where the firewire 800 external hard drive excelled even further were reading or editing large multimedia files, as well as playing back films and other media. For more specialist uses such as RAID striping and mirroring, firewire 800 drives perform with much higher efficiency and at quicker speeds than any other hard drive. If you have more than one drive sharing a single bus, firewire 800 can be of great benefit to your set up.

Despite all of these advantages and improvements in the technology, there is still little point in most standard users switching over or buying a new hard drive. For example, firewire devices which are older will not be made to transfer data any quicker than their maximum. What is more, you will need to buy different cables to connect your older style equipment with only four pins to the modern bus which has 9 pins. Lastly, the new firewire 800 standard will not be properly utilized if your computer’s internal drive can not use the additional bandwidth.

If you demand the fastest transfer speeds or have a complex RAID system, or need to run cables over more than 80m (which is possible with firewire 800) then the new firewire is definitely for you. For the rest of us, it may be worth our while to wait until prices come down!