The 1394 Hard Drive
The price for a Firewire hard drive starts at appxorimately $450. Two versions will be available, one with 30 and another with 45 GBytes capacity. We got a special 20 GByte sample for this review.
The external drive is as big as a ZIP drive from Iomega, but with 800 g (1.8 pounds) it is much heavier. As you can imagine, inside the case works a Western Digital drive, the 205AA.
The plastic housing of the drive can easily be opened up, enabling access to the actual hard drive inside.
This is the back of the WD's external drive. The round plug on the right side is for the power supply, which has to be connected seperately. Right in the middle you can see the two Firewire plugs. With Firewire being a peer-to-peer system, one is used to connect the drive to the controller, the other one can be used to connect another Firewire device. On the left side is the power up switch. You may turn the drive on or off independent from the data cable or computer status. Just think about turning off an external component case in a SCSI chain; it would likely cause your system to crash.
