Firewire is an emmy award winning protocol designed, developed and marketed by Apple, and is starting to slowly gain momentum in the PC world. At first many users were skeptical. "It's not standard," and "I can get USB devices that do the same things." Well let me tell you from first hand experience, USB is absolutely NO comparison to the raw power and the flexibility of Firewire.

First of all let me give you a little background on how I ended up with these new found feelings towards Firewire. It all started with a little home recording studio project (audio) I am working on. I needed some fast hard drive space (the internal drives in my Blue & White G3 don't quite cut the pro audio world), and I was looking for something reasonably inexpensive to fit the bill. Like many experienced (read old) Macintosh users my first thought was SCSI. I looked at various SCSI options available, and frankly found them just plain too expensive for what you are getting. SCSI is a great standard but is getting a little long in the tooth, and the usual price drops you can see with other 'older' type formats/standards have not come along with SCSI. This is what opened the door to examining other possibilities. I looked to friends for help.

My first reccomendation was to look at USB options. This path lead me to an empass instantly as USB has a BIG speed limitation. 6 Megabits per second just does not cut it when you are talking pro audio capable hard disk speed, so this ruled out this over-glorified serial protocol. USB is a good thing when it comes to using a mouse or keyboard, but for anything where you need to move any kind of data it is a big lunch bag letdown. This lead me to the next logical option for Mac users, Firewire.

With the help of a 'friend of a friend' I was pointed to the fabulous Firewire hardware site fwdepot.com. This site is run by Jeff Chasick, former engineer with companies such as Apple, Newer Technologies and ixMicro. He started this site to 'bring Firewire to the masses', and that he is doing quite nicely. He was extremely helpful in pointing me to the right hardware for my application.

To make a long story short, I ended up getting a Firewire drive enclosure built on the new Oxford 911 chip, a big leap forward in the Firewire hard drive arena. Let me tell you that I was not let down by Jeff's reccomendations. I put a nice new 7200 rpm ATA100 drive in the enclosure, plugged it into my mac, and presto...there was the dialogue asking me to format this new drive. I formatted it and in a matter of seconds was using the drive. Things don't get any simpler than this.

Now the fun part came along, testing the speed. In just some preliminary tests I found this drive to be at least 100% faster than my internal drives. Also add in the fact that it has an activity light on the enclosure (why Apple doesn't give us one in new cases I will never understand). This light makes it much easier to monitor the drive activity, especially for audio based setups, software meters are rarely to be trusted. Small things like this can make the biggest differences in the end.

All in all, to sum things up, this was a learning experience for me. Firewire IS in fact the new standard for the masses. It is super simple, yet extremely fast and flexible. With firewire hard drive raid options making hot swappable SCSI look it's age, it's a wonder it hasn't really taken off yet in the server world. And hard drives are not the only things that Firewire has to offer either, it's just the start. You can have scanners, CD burners, and yes even network your machines with Firewire. High bandwidth streaming video and audio around the corner, the options are endless. It is extremely fast, amazingly flexible, is 100% hot pluggable and easily portable! As a network administrator it just doesn't get any better than this for backups.

I urge all of you that haven't investigated Firewire to go do so now, you won't be sorry. Special thanks goes to Jeff at fwdepot.com for the advice and the great hardware.