Firewire is cool

For a couple of years now we’ve had an external USB drive enclosure. We bought it originally for our CD-writer, so that we could easily move it between our PCs. Unfortunately, burning CDs proved to be totally unreliable through the USB connection. So we put a spare hard disk in it instead, and used it for backups, and for shuttling large files to and fro. (We have a wireless network here at home, but sometimes it’s useful to be able to move large quantities of data between home and work, and a USB hard drive is really useful for that.)

The downside of USB is that it’s really quite slow. It’s fine if all you’re doing moving is a couple of megabytes, but anything beyond that gets kinda painful. Which is probably why I haven’t been using it for backups quite as often as I ought to.

But over the weekend I bought a Firewire hard disk enclosure on Ebay. Firewire is some 40 times faster than USB, and boy does it show. The unit arrived this morning. I stripped the 80GB disk out of the old USB enclosure, strapped it into the (sleek, shiny) Firewire enclosure, turned it on, and there it was. Windows XP has all the necessary drivers built in, and the disk appeared instantly. To check that it was working, I copied a 100MB file over to it…in just a few seconds. Wow.

The new enclosure is also much quieter than the old one, because it doesn’t have a fan built in to it, so there’s no problem with leaving the drive switched on all, or most of the time. Now all I need to do is get some backups scripts going… (If anyone can recommend a good, simple backup utility for Windows, I’d be most grateful.)

Oh, and one other thing: don’t even think about going to PC World (or Dixons) to buy a Firewire cable. The cheapest ones they have will set you back £20. Twenty quid. Do a search for “firewire cable” on Ebay, and grab one for under a fiver.