First Look: Western Digital’s 120 GB External FireWire Hard Drive

Wayne N. Kawamoto
Managing Editor, www.smallbusinesscomputing.com

Western Digital Corp. (NYSE: WDC) recently announced availability of its 120 GB FireWire external hard drive. The company’s newest WD FireWire external drive is designed with Western Digital’s 7,200 RPM WD Caviar hard drive and a second-generation 1394 to IDE bridge card that’s based on the Oxford 911 chipset.

According to the company, users should be able to add high-performance storage by simply adding its plug and play external hard drives. The drives are designed to stack together and may be daisy-chained, enabling users to further expand their storage capacity.

Western Digital’s FireWire external drives may be ideal for storing the large amounts of data generated by digital video editing, digital camcorders, digital cameras, scanners and digital music collections. Additionally, the external drives may be a convenient solution for backing up an internal hard drive in one step, on one hard drive rather than multiple CDs or other removable media.

WD’s FireWire external hard drives provide additional hot-swap storage that may be disconnected from the computer and locked up for security, or shared from computer to computer. The hard drives are compatible with any computer with a built-in FireWire port, using either Windows 98 SE or Mac OS 8.6 or higher operating systems. For computers without FireWire ports, Western Digital offers a PCI Adapter for desktops and a CardBus PC Card for notebooks, which should add the FireWire interface to these legacy systems. All Western Digital FireWire products carry a one-year warranty.

Pricing
Manufacturer’s suggested retail price for WD’s 120 GB FireWire Drive is $349.