FireWire 800: Fast Not Furious

Want faster external storage? Third-generation FireWire 800 (IEEE 1394b) claims to provide it, boasting a maximum data transfer rate of 800 megabits per second (about 100 megabytes per second). In our tests of the $449 LaCie D2 200GB external drive--which works with FireWire 800 as well as with the older 50-MBps FireWire 400 and 60-MBps USB 2.0--FireWire 800 outpaced the other interfaces, but often by less than you might expect from the spec (see chart). Data-read operations, such as playing back or editing multimedia files, showed the most benefit in our testing.

We did not use a striped RAID 0 setup in our assessment, but Mike Mihalik, LaCie's FireWire guru and product manager, says the company's testing shows remarkable gains from multiple drives sharing the new bus. FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 lack the headroom to allow more than modest RAID speed gains.

While power users may dive right in, most people have no reason to switch yet. Your older FireWire equipment will not run any faster, and you must buy new cables to attach older four-pin devices to the new nine-pin bus. One other note: A FireWire 800 interface to an external drive won't yield improved performance unless the internal drive can make use of the extra bandwidth (more than 35 to 40 MBps).

Caveats aside, we liked the faster throughput of the new drive, and the potential for cheap high-performance RAID setups (especially as network-attached storage) is tantalizing. In addition, FireWire 800 can run over 300 feet with special cables, which allows interesting networking and drive-sharing possibilities. Today, most FireWire 800 devices are external hard drives; DV equipment may get upgraded later. Our advice for now: Keep your older FireWire and USB 2.0 devices, and go for FireWire 800 either when prices drop or when maximum speed becomes paramount.