Granite Digital FireWire 800 Hot-Swap Series - Manual (Page 4)

Granite Digital • 3101 Whipple Rd. • Union City, Ca. 94587 www.granitedigital.com
Page 4 USERS GUIDE
How FireWire Works
In order to get FireWire to perform at its maximum speed, the following
items should be considered:
1) The bridge chip (our cases uses the Initio or Oxford) must be capable of
running 400Mbits / second (FW 400) or 800Mbits / second (FW 800). There
are many bridge chips that are installed in cases that do not perform at this
level. Additionally, we are one of a few manufacturers that actually writes
the firmware for the Oxford parts. This has allowed us to not only add addi-
tional compatibility but also to get every ounce of power from the Oxford
part. The Granite Digital Website,
www.granitedigital.com also has available
utilities to continually upgrade this firmware as new devices hit the market.
Currently our line of case kits supports the most popular Hard Drives, CD-
Roms, CD-RW, DVD Readers, DVD-RW, Tape Drives, and Optical Drives.
2) The drive mechanism must go fast. Currently, there is no available drive
that will transfer data and sustain 800 Mbits/second. The fastest drives usual-
ly perform in the 40+ MB/s (MegaByte Per Second) range. These drives
include most of the 7200rpm mechanisms. The larger cache drives also per-
form better than the smaller cache drives. To see an unbiased (we hope)
opinion take a look at
www.barefeats.com . This site offers benchmark test-
ing that covers most of the current drive models.
3) The computer and the speed of its PCI bus will directly affect the per-
formance of the FireWire Bus. An example is the Macintosh Computer that
helped pioneer FireWire. Earlier models run at a fraction of the speed of the
newer models. The technology associated with FireWire has improved dra-
matically and with this change, speed has improved. To get the fastest
speeds you will need the newest technology. On the Windows side, XP runs
FireWire faster than 98SE. Again, the newer technologies offer the greatest
performance levels.