Of couse you cannot use the Firewire drive without an interface. Western Digital also sells the WDAD002 PCI card or WDAD003 PC-Card for notebooks. You are lucky if you are using a Sony Vaio notebook, as all of them are equipped with a Firewire interface by default.
According to the product specs, the card is able to deal with max. 63 devices and supports all Firewire modes: 400, 200 or 100 MBits/s.
Gigabyte GA-6VX7-1394
The GA-6VX7-1394 comes with three Firewire connectors. We had no difficulties to run the WD drive. Also the performance did not differ much from the setup using the WD PCI controller card. Gigabyte makes use of a Texas Instruments chip (TSB12LV23), while Western Digital equips their cards with a NEC model (PC72870).
Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.
