I am looking at some nice external firewire hard drives.  I noticed that some of the hard drives are firewire 400 and some are firewire 800.  I know that the firewire 800 drives will work with a firewire 400 compliant computer, but I don’t want to pay for a firewire 800 drive if my computer is not capable of using the extra speed.

So my question is, how can I figure out if the firewire controller on my computer is 400 or 800?

Thanks

I figured it out,

firewire 400 cards are called: (IEEE 1394)
and firewire 800 cards are called: (IEEE 1394b)

You may consider shelling out a little extra cash for a 1394b hard disk now so that you next computer will be able to utilize the bandwidth...

If you can afford it or plan on doing video editing or transferring very large files to the external drive go ahead and get the Firewire 800 it gives you more speed to grow with. If the drive is for simple external storage Firewire 400 is plenty.

Thanks, I agree with your reasoning. I think I‘ll get the 1394b model.

I think this model would fit my needs fairly well:




LaCie Big Disk with Triple Interface 500GB

Get one that also has USB 2 for more compatibility with other machines.