eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Portable 250GB hard drives from EZQuest Inc. will soon communicate twice as fast, officials of the Yorba Linda, Calif. company said Thursday.
The new Cobra+ FireWire 800, using the new 1394B specification, receives and transmits data at approximately 100MBps. It also has a USB 2.0 connection.
The new drive will ship by late April, said Dean Kishiyama, chief engineer. Pricing is not yet announced.
“Later on theyre going to push this up to FireWire 1600,” with another speed doubling, Kishiyama said. Thats more than a year away, but while the current 1394B upgrade requires that users computers have compatible ports, the future upgrade will probably be through firmware, he said.
Besides speed, 1394B can communicate over distances up to 100 meters, using a third-party optical cable. The older 1394 standard is limited to 4.5 meters.
EZQuest is also interested in ways to connect portable hard drives to mobile devices, which dont typically have FireWire or USB ports. For the possibility of Compact Flash or other adapter to FireWire or USB, “If it existed, we would definitely get ourselves into that somehow,” Kishiyama said.
EZQuest also makes DVD-R drives, but doesnt plan to give those the new connections. “It doesnt make it any faster. The drive is the bottleneck when it comes to DVD-R, not the interface,” he explained.
Latest Storage News:
Search for more stories by Evan Koblentz.
Find white papers on storage.
For more storage scoops, check out Ziff Davis Storage Supersite.