The ultimate guide on the Firewire hard drive
This article will cover in great detail the specs of a Firewire hard drive. First of all we must clearly define what Firewire is in the first place. Firewire is a standard developed by Apple Computers. It's tech name is IEEE 1394. I think that you agree that Firewire sounds better. The main advantage that this technology brings is the huge transfer speed at about 400 megabits per second. This technology is available in many notebooks, desktop computers, camcorders, CD writers and obviously external hard drives. The main advantage of this technology is the enormous speed, while as drawbacks are the very high cost and well the standard's lack of standard. Now don't get confused. What I mean to say is that those Apple technicians and engineers designed a very good product which required only one 6 pinned cable, 2 cable pins being used as the power supply. Now the notebooks come in. These naturally tend to look at power reduction like at the Holy Grail and this is why they decided to take out the two power pins. Now of course this means a lot of headaches for you as you will most likely need to buy a six pin to four pin adapter and also you will have to find an additional power source. This headache alone will cost you a measly 50 bucks or so. But enough about the Firewire standard let's now talk about the Firewire hard drive. The main advantage that a Firewire hard drive has over a traditional one is not the speed as you might first be inclined to think. Firewire transforms the hard drive into a plug and play device, this way hard drives increase your mobility and transforms them into a user friendly device. But of course plug and play is not a Firewire trademark, Universal Serial Bus achieves this too at a much lower cost, well actually not that low you would save about 20 bucks, what Firewire delivers best is speed and with an improved standard looming at the horizon which will deliver about 800 megabits per second you will really feel that power. Unfortunately the lack of consistence regarding the system cut very much from this technology's appeal. You should always take care when buying a laptop that the Firewire has 6 pins. This way you can truly experience the mobility that this technology has to offer. Now of course you may wonder why on earth you would need such mobility in the first place. I will provide several scenarios in which you will surely see the advantages of such a technology. Obviously the most important application of Firewire hard drives is back up for your notebook in almost any given circumstance. The old cliché of the hacker sitting endless hours in front of a computer is about to die. Laptops transformed the gurus and made of them big fans of the Starbucks chain of cafes, in the United States at least, Coffee Republic may be the alternative in UK. Anyway the Firewire will surely help in making those critical backups even in these places. Alternatively the Starbucks café may very well become a beach in the Caribbean islands or Tahiti. All you need us the proximity of an AC power source and an Internet hotspot and the power source is really not that necessary. Another role for which the Firewire technology is greatly suited is the carrier role. Typically nowadays this is done via networks, but again networks can fail and are subjected to a great deal of security holes, not to mention physical restrictions. You won't have much of a network on a Tahiti beach and I'm not sure that you would want one in the first place. Carrying data on the Firewire hard drive is just a breeze and it is really simple as you don't have to do very much except plug in the damn thing. There are of course many other possible scenarios in which this technology could greatly help. The one I like most is the ability to construct the unhackable computer. By making sure that the computer is never actually communicating with other computers there is absolutely no way that it can be hacked into. The Firewire hard drive will serve as the mean of communication with other computers. I know that this might sound a little bit extreme, but it is in fact a high tech answer to a very old problem. You can imagine an impenetrable system this way and I'm sure that if it has been imagined it is already used. Of course you would have to limit the physical access to the protected computer, but that is far easier to accomplish then watching out constantly for worms, Trojans and viruses. The intelligence agencies have been using this sort of technique for years, now Firewire is only helping in bringing it to the general population. In a matter of only a few years I am sure that similar technologies will continue to arise as the technology world demands more and more mobility and speed. The Firewire hard drive will most likely disappear, not because Firewire is a faulty technology, but because hard drives are pretty much reaching their limit. Flash memory seems to be the next winner which will take over the hard drive manufacturing industry. In 10 years or so hard drives will probably become obsolete, mobility and speed will not. This sort of technology break is nothing than the response to the great mobility that memory sticks offer. Hard drives may still have the edge in regards to storage space, but that will soon be over.
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