Western Digital FIREWIRE portable drives?

Does anyone have first-hand experience with the FIREWIRE version of WD portable drives?

Like so many others, we've bought WD drives from Costco and find them reliable. Great little product, but they are sooooooooooooooooooo sloooooooooooooooooooooooow.

I see at the WD site they offer a firewire version for not much more money, and B&H sells them, too.

Any experience, compliments or complaints?

I'm going nuts switching back and forth between my firewire drives and the WD USB's. I'm using them as little as possible as it is, even as I need to buy more drives. But the new ones certainly aren't going to be sputtering USB models, whichever brand I settle on.

Hank, I too would like to hear input on this one. I have two old Maxtor USB drives and just bought my first WD drive. The WD is extremely slow even in comparison to the two Maxtor’s. Hard to understand as they are all USB port driven. My first concern was of course reliability on the latest purchase. As a result I had noticed the latest Maxtor’s had been receiving very poor ratings for the latest manufacture being used for their drives. Where as the WD had very strong reliability ratings throughout. I just wish I knew why they are so slow compared to the old Maxtor’s.

I'm not sure standard Firewire is much faster than USB2. I have a few of the Maxtor USB/Firewire800 drives which have worked flawlessly for me. When hooked up to the Firewire 800 ports I added to my computer, transfers are almost exactly twice the speed of USB2. Make sure if you want speed to get the Firewire 800.

Interesting Jim, and the USB2/Firewire speed difference may be something specific to Macs. My old Wiebetech USB 400's are more than twice as fast as the brand new WD USB2 drives. FW800 looks like it will be off the charts. That's encouraging!

http://www.sata-io.org/esata.asp

What's the link for Gene?

http://www.sata-io.org/esata.asp

Hank - It's an external SATA interface specifically for large volume transfer like those to a hard drive. It should be much faster than USB or Firewire - closer to internal drive speeds. But you'd probably have to buy a card to support it on your laptop, and I don't think there are many portable (i.e. power from a laptop) eSATA drives out there. I haven't really looked into it myself though.

Thanks for picking up the ball and describing the site, David. It doesn't come close to my needs, as you already surmise.

And sorry, Gene. I DO NOT go to anonymous sites, especially when they're not linked via button for my convenience. And certainly after a haughty double post. If it's too much trouble to tell me what a site is about, it's waaaaay too much work for me to cut and paste the address. Web etiquette and basic fair trade policy in my mind!

Hank, I have a WD 320Gb external with firewire 800. Both my externals are firewire. I can't compare speeds with USB2 because firewire is all I've ever used for my externals. I have absolutely no complaints about the WD drive (my other is a Maxtor on its second iteration after the first one died on warrranty). I've had the WD about a year and a half. I never turn it on unless I need to use it, and when finished I turn it off right away. Heat is one thing that kills these inexpensive drives faster than anything, I believe, and even idling they generate heat. When I run either external for any length of time, I turn a small fan on it to dissipate heat more quickly.

My wife has a WD 320Gb unit like mine, but hers is a USB2. Since her computer is faster than mine, our upload speeds are about the same. She's had the same great results I have, and she uses the same operating regimen as I do.

Thanks for picking up the ball and describing the site, David.

No problem...it helps that I knew what it was when I saw the link - I didn't actually go to that page.

Maybe this will help. I use a Macintosh. I have bought various USB WD drives. All work fine now. I've liked WD drives for way too many years to tell you. HOWEVER, at first plug and play, they were SLOW. I found an article concerning this and that if you want them to speed up on the Mac, then you must reformat them specifically for the Mac. I forget the details, but it worked fine. I was pretty ticked off at first. I am even running them on a Mac using USB v1, not 2 and they are fine for me. No, they are not running at usb 2 speed and certainly not firewire speed. But they are plenty fine for me at the time being on my older Mac. Before I reformated them, I would say they ran sooooooooo sloooooooooow, too. Maybe this will help you.

Troup Nightingale

Troup, now that's just a big ole tease, telling us there's a great way to speed up transfer from Macs but not offering more.

We use Macs too. While I've been happy with the speed, if it can get faster, I'd be even happier.

This won't help you Hank as I know that you are a MAC person. If you are a PC person, I have found that I have to go to properties for the drive and select Hardware from the tabs. Find you device, yes you have to select the drive twice. Highlight the drive and select properties from the tab below. There will be another pop-up window, select the Policies tab. This will give you two options. The first is Optimize for quick removal. This is almost as slow as the old RS-232 connections. I don't know why it is the default setting. The other is Optimize for performance. When I finally found this and set this up, I found that the USB 2 drives were about as fast as the Firewire drive.

You might check the newer WD drives Hank. The last one I bought has USB2, Firewire, as well as eSATA connections.

For anyone who's interested, I did find these drives online that are eSATA but powered through the USB so no wall plug required (which is what I, and I think Hank, would want). You'd still need an eSATA interface card in your laptop of course, but it's an option. I haven't seen these before myself...so no idea about actual performance, reliability, etc.

Thanks folks. Looks like we're going to give the WD firewires a whirl. We've got four of the USB 500GB's on hand, but we're facing some big storage adjustments in our system, so they should fill pretty quickly (in USB terms anyway!) and we can retire them to the safe deposit box and go to the firewires for daily use. The latter involves an hour's drive between our studio and our home office, with computers in both locations and the need to transport daily files between them. Hence the frustration with USB...... at the end of a long day......when you still face a long evening of image processing.......followed by a return to the studio and uploading for client review and sales, then transmission to our lab. Bonus points for firewire also occur when traveling and backing up to laptops.......after a long day in the field.................

500 GB, USB2, no external power needed, $130 at Costco, got 3 and there working like a charm..........

Yeah, that's what I picked up on my last pass through The City, and the inspiration for my post. I gave some of them to my wife and she about took my head off after years with the Wiebetech firewires. I've since found 500GB firewire versions on the WD site and B&H for very little more, and was wondering about others' experience. All 5 of our Macs join my wife in unhappiness with the USB versions.

If Mama ain't happy ain't nobody happy.

And when her beloved Macs misbehave, she redefines unhappy.

USB 2.0 is faster than Firewire 400 but slower than Firewire 800. However I don't think that's the real issue at play with these portable drives. Portable drive tend to have a disk speed of 5,200 rpm while the desktop versions are 7,200 rpm or faster.

I have a couple of older Seagate 7,200 rpm USB 2.0 Portable hard drives (that are sadly discontinued now) that knock the socks of my Maxtor, Western Digital and Seagate Portable 5,200 rpm hard drives.

I can't wait for these companies to start producing 10,000 rpm portable hard drives!

Sorry - just had open shoulder surgery on Thursday and the chemicals I am using to ease the pain kinda blurred my thought processes and interfered with my mechanical processes - seriously, I did not intentionally double post and wasn't aware that I hit the button twice until you brought it up. Esata is much faster than anything brought up in this thread, and for about $50 you can get the adapter to allow you to connect such a drive to a computer (cardbus32 or PCI) and another $15-$30 will get you a drive enclosure with an esata interface You then put any SATA hardrive in the enclosure and voila! State of the art superfast file transfer speeds. Used a similar solution for a new media lab in a local college - worked like a charm

BTW, Hank, you gotta chill, dude! Just trying to be helpful and all that. Wasn't trying to twist your arm and make you do something you would NEVER do, like following an anonymous link to a suspect web site. Anonymous to you maybe, but well-known and often referred to in other circles, I can assure you. Anyway, no worries, won't hold it against you :)

Sorry about your shoulder surgery Gene. Makes for tough typing to say the least, not to mention the challenge in picking up and holding a camera!

Hey Hank, You're 100% on that. Camera-holding is out of the question for the moment. But the good thing is that I have a lot less pain than when I dislocated it while skiing last year. I should be back to my usual antics in short order. Makes me appreciate it that much more. Did I mention that I have a new-found respect for the bio-chemists that come up with newer and better ways of abating pain. ;-)

Just hoping that there will be a few bald eagles left for me to shoot here in the Hudson Valley by the time I feel strong enough to grab the big lens.

Thanks!