[mythtv-users] Firewire Drives--or What are these things?
Chuck Rice
chuck at wildrice.com
Wed Dec 15 01:34:30 UTC 2004
At 5:40 PM -0700 12/14/04, Bearcat M. Sandor wrote:
>Folks,
>
>While dreaming up a htpc box, and looking through my Sweet Water catalog I
>came across these drives:
>
>http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/GT308/
>
>
>These are said to be quiet firewire drives. I thought firewire was just an
>interface. Is there any such beast as a firewire drive or are they just scsi
>drives in a firewire chassis?
>
>Also, these things are damn expensive at $440 for 200 gb.
>
>What makes these worth it?
I use something like these, though a bit more expensive. I use the 8
bay version in this picture:
<http://www.firewiremax.com/fire-wire-1394-ilink/lcdreen.html>
The advantage is that you can chain a lot of them together. With two
of these FireWire cases, I have room for 16 drives, though I have
only filled in 10 slots so far. I started using 250 GB drives and
have now started to buy 300 to 400 GB drives, so that gives me room
for over 4 TB of video, or about 600 DVDs. Each drive has its own
temperature controlled fan and the blue LED screen tells you drive
temp and fan speed. Besides they look really cool for a Home Theater!
:) I back it up with a Quantum SDLT320 tape drive.
I like to collect old black and white movies but I hate the hassle of
DVDs, so as I buy them, I load them into the MovieDatabase. I am
hoping that Myth will give me a better way to catalog them.
FireWire is just an interface, but but the case is built with
FireWire controllers. You plug IDE drives into the controller. The
bays are also swappable, so you can pull a failing drive, replace it,
and restore from backup. they are also RAIDible if I can Tivo RAID
into a Verb. -Chuck-
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