What's the point of Firewire 800 on a HD?

[plunar]

I only ask, because I don't understand why a consumer grade external HD like the My Book Pro supports FW800 when the drive itself could never hope to come close to the 800mbit/sec that fw800 offers.

[mim]

There are plenty of external drive enclosures that support drives (RAID's) that will far exceed Firewire 400 specs. Hence Firewire 800. Remember that your MBP can access these drives just like an internal drive across the FW connection - it's not just for copying files from an external drive to your internal drive, or vice-versa.

Lots of people working with video really lamented the fact that the first MBP's didn't have FW800.