The Product
Upon taking a closer look at the 1394 External Storage, I soon realized
that it was actually just a 80GB 5400RPM hard drive attached to a
controller via an IDE cable, encased in a plastic box. The controller
itself is what has the built-in 1394 ports on it allowing you to connect
the drive up to your system.
The 1394 External Storage comes pre-formatted with FAT32 file system
allowing you to simply hook it up to your PC and have it accessible
instantly without having to format it.
The 1394 External Storage is available in 40GB and 80GB sizes allowing
you to choose which best suit your needs. The one I am reviewing
today is the 80GB.
A common question I know that some of you may have is can you boot
from the 1394 External Storage device? As far as I am aware of,
you cannot unless you have MacOS 9.0.2 or later. Basically, if you
don't have MacOS 9.0.2 or later, you should use this drive as additional
storage only. Please correct me if this is wrong.
Also, you should be aware that since the drive is not bootable,
it also would not be accessible in DOS for formatting or partitioning.
Formatting or partitioning of the drive will have to be done in
one of the supported operating systems.
Included on the 1394 External Storage are two 1394 ports. This
allows you to chain the drive with another 1394 device just like
with SCSI. Unlike SCSI though, you do not have to terminate the
end.
Testing
From the above results you can see that the Maxtor 1394 Drive performs
decent in comparison to a EIDE UDMA 66 drive. From the Sisoft
Sandra Drives Benchmark you can see that the drive outperforms
an EIDE UDMA 66 drive.
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