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External Hard Drive with Firewire

heisenberg123

heisenberg123

macrumors 603
Original poster
Oct 31, 2010
6,498
9
Hamilton, Ontario
I am having a heck of a time finding a external hard drive with firewire interface, I mean I found a few online but anywhere I've gone instore only have usb 2.0 and 3.0, is firewire no longer used for external hard drives?

anyone use a external with firewire and can recommend one in 1TB that would be appreciated
 
Anything from major vendors i.e. lacie or western digital, OWC will work all right. Most will be expensive because they probably use some derivative of the standard oxford chipset. Anything else is garbage.
 
thanks for the feedback i guess i was more interested in why the majority don't have both, my 2 year old 500GB WD MYBOOK had firewire but not too may of the WD Playbooks have it now, its kinda funny it came with firewire when i used a dell laptop and never really knew what firewire is, now that I'm aware of firewire its only 1 out of every 10 I've found online and not really any in any shops I've been too.

am i over rating firewire? will 2.0 usb do just fine for backup either with time machine or CCC?
 
Apple stores have plenty of Firewire external HDs. Of course, they add their little apple store premium to the price.

Most other retailers only carry a very small selection of Firewire external HDDs in store. Most new products support USB 3.0, which is vastly superior (5x faster I think). Adding firewire support would just increase the price on those devices. It's just us stupid apple users that are stuck with USB 2.0 and firewire, in the absence of affordable thunderbolt storage.
 
iisforiphone said:
I am having a heck of a time finding a external hard drive with firewire interface, I mean I found a few online but anywhere I've gone instore only have usb 2.0 and 3.0, is firewire no longer used for external hard drives?

anyone use a external with firewire and can recommend one in 1TB that would be appreciated
Click to expand...

I like OWC's enclosures. Bit more expensive but to me worth it. You can go bare bones and use your own drive or get a kit. They often have open box specials too if you are patient. I run a single Elite on my imac and a dual HD unit with soft RAID for my HTPC mini.

USB only drives account for probably > 90% of drives sold. Higher end WD/Seagate ones will have multiple interfaces such as the triple or quad interface 'pro' type drives (USB, FW's, eSata).

If you want the best pricing, go to newegg, and use their search filter to find FW only drives. Note: HD pricing is on the rise so now's the time...

- b
 
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