Benchmarks: Data Transfer, Performance Diagram
The Firewire drive is able to provide continuously 12 MBytes/s. As the drive is definitely faster, there must be some limiting factor.
Benchmarks: Data Transfer
Of couse we did not expect the drive to be quite as fast as a standard IDE drive. Nevertheless, the transfer speed is quite good for an external solution. 2.5" notebook drives usually achieve about half the performance of a desktop drive. That's why the WD Firewire drive is a great performer for notebook users.
The transfer speed of WD's new 1394-solution could be quite a bit higher, since the controller chip in our test sample is interfacing with the HDD at PIO 4 mode only, which doesn't allow a higher bandwidth than 16 MB/s. The final 30 and 45 GByte drives will be equipped with a new chip, which will enable UltraDMA mode 2 (33 MBytes/s). This should speed up the drive considerably.