Pyro 1394 firewire drive kit reviewed at HomeNetHelp

Pyro 1394 Drive Kit

from ADS Technology link

Review Type: Hands On

Reviewer: Chris Kaminski

Date: December 08, 2000

OS': Win98SE, WinME, Win2000, Mac OS 9.0+

This is one sweet looking drive kit. The Pyro 1394 drive kit is an external IDE to Firewire drive kit that is fully OHCI compliant. The device will hold most standard IDE devices including Hard Drives, DVD, and CD Drives. Three external 6 pin firewire ports make connecting additional Firewire devices a snap. Close examination of the circuit board revealed the fact that this device also acts as a Firewire repeater!

Fit and finish on this kit is superb. Inside, an all-metal enclosure houses your drive, power supply and interface board. The power supply is separated from the rest of the unit by a metal barrier. A transparent plastic guard on the power supply keeps you from electrocuting yourself (you did unplug it right?). Outside, a semi-transparent plastic case with eight large ‘gummy’ rubber feet slides snugly over the metal enclosure. The large rubber feet allow the drive to stand in 4 orientations. They also make stacking enclosures easy and safe.

Installing a drive into this device was a SNAP. Open it up, screw in your hard drive or CDROM, connect your IDE and Power cable (audio cable too if a CDROM), and screw it back together! Once connected to your system, ADS has a utility to set CDROM or Hard Drive mode on the kit. It’s a small program and only needs to be run once. The drive will be automatically recognized by your operating system. Windows 2000 and ME run the drive with no drivers, but Windows 98SE has needs an update/patch from Microsoft. This patch is included on the CD and is automatically installed with the ‘Drive Mode’ software.

Bundled Software: As if the drive was not enough, ADS decided to bundle PowerQuest’s DataKeeper software ($49 retail). DataKeeper is a "real-time" backup solution that automatically backs up combinations of drives, folders or files every time they're changed without user intervention BusLink system to anyone.

Performance: Both HDTach and WinBench 99 1.2 would not function with the Pyro Drive Kit. This is not unexpected because of the Firewire bus - were probably not designed to handle anything other than SCSI and IDE. The only benchmark program I found that worked with the drive kit was Performance Test by PassMark Software (www.passmark.com). All three tests were done on the exact same computer using the exact same hardware. Windows SE benchmark was done WITH the Microsoft storage update installed. IDE bencmarks in 98SE and ME reflect the speed with 'DMA' enabled.

	Read (per second)				Random Seek +RW (per second)
	IDE (DMA enabled)		Pyro Drive Kit		IDE (DMA enabled)		Pyro 1394
OS	MBytes	MBits	MBytes	MBits	MBytes	MBits	MBytes	MBits
Win 98SE	16.3	130.4	5.1	40.8	3.0	24	2.7	21.6
Win ME	16.3	130.4	6.5	52	3.0	24	2.9	23.2
Win 2000 Pro	22.1	176.8	12.5	100	3.7	29.6	2.9	23.2

The Results above show that the speed of the Pyro drive system depends heavily on the operating system.  Read performance under Windows 2000 was almost double Windows ME.  Perhaps we will soon see another set of Firewire drivers released for Windows ME/98SE that boost performance.

· PYRO 1394 Drive Enclosure with built-in Power Supply

· 2 meter - 6 pin to 6 pin 1394 cable

· 10" - 6 pin to 6 pin 1394 daisy chain cable

· Flat ribbon cable

· Screw kit for installing hard drive or CD drives

· Bezel cover for hard drive installations

Pyro 1394 firewire drive kit reviewed at HomeNetHelp