FIREWIRE CABLES

IDE to IEEE1394 (also known as FireWire or iLINK) case kits and an IDE hard drive or optical drive provide an attractive and inexpensive solution for those looking to add one or more storage devices to a PC. Although some PCs (e.g., most Sony VAIO models) now ship with IEEE 1394 ports built in as a standard feature, most don't. We tested these drive enclosure kits with Orange Micro's FireWire+USB 2.0 card, an ADS Pyro 1394 adapter and the Creative Labs Audigy sound card, each of which provides IEEE 1394 support on PCs lacking this feature innately.  In this article, we'll look at some of the most popular enclosure kits and the issues you may encounter with them.

On the Test Bench
We tested the FireXpress case from CompuCable (compucable.com), the Pyro 1394 Drive Kit (not the new Oxford 911-based Drive Kit II) from ADS (adstech.com) and the Macally IDE to FireWire HDD enclosure (macally.com), which despite the company's focus on Macintosh products, worked fine on a PC, too. Indeed, all of the drives worked without requiring additional software under both Windows Me and Windows XP. The bad news? Each of the units behaved surprisingly differently during our tests -- and we're not just talking about performance. See the chart below for comparative details.

Pyro: Compatibility Caveats
On the surface, the Pyro drive appears to have the best design. It certainly has one of the nicest looking cases -- stackable, and molded from translucent smoky gray plastic, just clear enough to allow the large FireWire logo on the drive's metal shield underneath to show through. Connecting the drive was, as with all the drives, a snap: we slid open the case, bolted the drive in place with the supplied screws, connected the ribbon cable and power plug, and powered it up, ready to go.

However, once attached to the computer via the included 6-pin-to-6-pin IEEE 1394 cable, we encountered a few compatibility glitches worth mentioning. Most seriously, it consistently produced read/write errors while writing data with our 80GB Maxtor drive when connected to the Orange Micro card. And when we attempted to configure it with a DVD/CD writer, this drive showed up in the Windows Device Manager, but reported an error and couldn't be accessed. It also seemed to be unable to format the Maxtor drive properly on a Mac -- but, interestingly, was able to complete the operation on the same drive when connected to our FireWire-equipped PC running Windows XP. This clearly suggested that our choice of FireWire controller card was part -- if not all -- of the problem. Indeed, we replaced the Orange Micro card with ADS' own Pyro 1394 adapter and encountered no more difficulties. ADS acknowledges problems with IEEE 1394 cards from Orange Micro, Ratoc and Western Digital (and presumably other cards based on the NEC 1394 controller chipset) and recommends the purchase of a TI 1394 chipset-based FireWire card. (See our review of EEE 1394 cards for more information on this topic.)

We haven't yet tested the second-generation ADS "1394 Drive Kit II" but, as it is based on the same high-performance Oxford 911 chipset as the FireXpress kit (described below), we would expect it to behave better than this model. Indeed, the extra FireWire port is an attractive bonus on the Pyro and the revised Drive Kit II model would  likely have been our editor's choice, had we been able to obtain one for this test. As it is, avoid this first-generation model. In addition to being somewhat slower than the revised enclosures featuring Oxford 911 bridge chipsets (this one uses the OXFW900, which the company says supports sustained IDE data transfer rates peaking at 25Mbps; the newer Oxford 911 claims a peak IDE transfer rate of 66Mbytes per second), this chassis seemed to have more than its share of troubles with our test machine's Orange Micro FireWire adapter.

FireXpress: Fastest Overall
Marketing materials and naive journalists often tout the speed of FireWire ports as "400Mb per second" and this, unfortunately, has led many people to unrealistic expectations with regard to the speed you are likely to achieve with any of these drive kits. Put simply: you'll get far less than that in the real world. Expect less than half the performance of your PC's built-in IDE drive, and even lower FireWire throughput if you use a portable, or expect to daisy chain drives together (FireWire supports up to 63 chained drives, however, when attempting demanding tasks such as capturing DV video, only one IEEE 1394 device should be on the chain.)

Of the available IEEE 1394 controllers on the market, though, almost everybody agrees the Oxford 911 chipset currently is the best performer. However, the performance boost isn't all that dramatic. The CompuCable FireXpress managed only about 25% better performance overall than the slowest drive in our test. It took 46 seconds to copy 167MB of data from a fast SCSI hard drive to an 80GB ATA100 Maxtor hard drive. While that's a lot better than one might achieve with a hard drive connected via USB 1.1, it pales in comparison to the throughput you'd see if you connected the IDE drive to the internal IDE cable directly -- or, indeed, by adding an ATA66 or ATA100 IDE controller card to your PC, should it lack this feature. Nevertheless, the FireXpress proved to be the both the fastest and the most compatible product in our tests -- with one important exception.

During our tests with the Maxtor drive and the Orange Micro controller, we noticed a disturbing -- and semi-random -- tendency for files to become corrupted. This only seemed to happen during write operations; we read files that had previously been written to the drive without difficulties. But write operations such as unzipping an archive or installing a program almost always failed. Sure enough, the company we bought the drive from confirms that it has received numerous reports from Maxtor drive users of similar problems. We replaced the drive with a Quantum Fireball SE mechanism and everything worked. IBM and Seagate drives are also reported to function as expected. However, a 30GB Quantum AS produced the same maddeningly random data corruption errors we'd seen with the Maxtor.

Once this annoying problem was sorted out, the drive was a stellar performer. It was the only enclosure that worked immediately under Windows XP and, although it failed to recognize one of the hard drives (an old 516MB Quantum Lightning) we connected to it, it worked well with the Quantum SE drive and would, we think, be likely to work well with most other hard drives (other than those from Maxtor/Quantum, of course) on the market, when connected to a TI-based 1394 card such as the ADS Pyro 1394 adapter.

Macally: A few problems...
This drive represents a real mixed bag of pros and cons. On the positive side, it was the only drive in this test to work correctly with all our hard drives, and that certainly rates as a big plus in our book. Ironically, a label on the box displays a short drive compatibility list naming only a handful of drive models by name, plus the CA, KX and KA series of Quantum drives. 

The Macally drive also includes a clever firmware routine that makes the drive look like a standard SCSI peripheral to your software, allowing FireWire devices to be used with programs that normally wouldn't support them. However, its smart electronics are hampered by the lowest quality case and power supply of all the units listed here, and our supplier confirms that power supply failures are more frequent with this model than with the others. Indeed, with our Quantum Lightning hard drive installed, this unit will not even spin up the drive unless the FireWire cable is disconnected from the back of the case when the power is applied. We don't know what's up with that (it did, however, work when connected to a powered FireWire hub), but this horrible limitation alone is enough to put this case on our 'definitely not recommended' list. Moreover, it is the only unit tested here that does not support optical drives at all, nor can it be reprogrammed by the user to do so. (Macally sells a separate model especially for use with CD-RW and other optical drives.) In a pinch, this enclosure would do the trick if you are looking  to transport large files between a Mac and a PC. It, like all the other kits noted here, allows a DOS-formatted drive to be mounted and used on a Mac, making such a drive ideally suited to "sneakernet" applications, moving files between PCs and Macs. But there are better choices, unless you require the SCSI emulation feature -- which seems to us a lot less useful in a hard drive than it would be in, say, a CD writer.

Conclusion
If not for its difficult-to-diagnose data corruption problems and shoddy documentation, the FireXpress would have been our editor's choice for those seeking a stylish and speedy IDE-to-FireWire drive kit at a bargain price. However, as it is, the second-generation ADS drive kit, with its value-adding software bundle for Windows PCs and detailed documentation, appears to be a better choice. Although you don't need any of its bundled software for basic functionality under Windows 98 or newer systems, the newer model represents better value than the first-generation model for the nominal price premium you'll pay. Although we eventually managed to find satisfaction with the kit based on the Oxford 900 chip, once we found a compatible hard drive -- in our case, the 30GB Quantum Fireball Plus AS -- it is faint praise to say that it ultimately ended up being the least troublesome of the drives we tested.

But overall, the number of glitches with various hard drives we encountered and the severity of the data corruption problems that plagued us lead us to one inescapable conclusion: adding your own hard drive to one of these drive kits is just too much trouble. You are much better off to buy a kit preconfigured with a drive -- and, if necessary, an IEEE 1394 card based on a TI chipset. In any event, we recommend buying from a source with a no-penalty return policy. Our cross-platform test results also suggest that the problems we experienced might have been partly or entirely the fault of our choice of IEEE 1394 controller card. Thus, you might encounter no problems at all with any of these boxes... in which case the FireXpress product might once again prove to be the most attractive choice.