CNET editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Excellent
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 02/15/2005
- Released on: 09/01/2004
Standing vertically at about 6.25 inches high and about 1.7 inches wide (the base is a stabilizing 2.3 inches wide) the matte silver Extreme is undeniably attractive. The front panel sports only a large but subdued blue power switch/activity light; however, the d2 Extreme's versatility is evidenced by a heavily populated back panel, with two FireWire 800 ports, a single FireWire 400 port, one USB 2.0 port, a Kensington lock port, an AC jack, and a heat-dissipating vent.
As you can gather from the port list, FireWire 800, a.k.a. IEEE 1394b or FireWire B, and its IEEE 1394a predecessor aren't physically compatible in their pure forms, though the new spec does provide for "bilingual" type connections, which the LaCie drive doesn't implement. The higher 100MB per second bandwidth of 1394b comes with the help of two additional wires to assure signal integrity, plus an extra wire for future expansion, hence, FireWire 800 cables and connectors use 9 pins instead of IEEE 1394a's 6 (or 4 without the two wires that provide bus power). But it's also backward-compatible, so you can use 9-pin to 6-pin and 9-pin to 4-pin adapters that ignore the extra wires, though you'll be operating in 1394a mode. Unfortunately, motherboards and PCs that support FireWire 800 are as rare as hen's teeth these days, so, unless you're buying a newer Mac, you'll probably need an adapter such as the Adaptec FireConnect 8300 we used for our testing.
The d2 Extreme's performance in our 400MB folder and 1.9GB large-file copy tests was exceptional. It averaged 10.2MB per second with USB 2.0, 11.4MB per second with IEEE 1394a, and a whopping 12MB per second with FireWire 800. Our previous high-water mark with any interface was 9MB per second. Most of the gain came in 400MB folder tests; reading and writing the 1.9GB file was no faster than what we've seen from other recent external hard drives.
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