SmartDisk Releases 800Mbps FireWire Drive - Announcement Pulled


SmartDisk has released 800Mb/ps FireWire drives - almost.

The article, [article no longer available - Ed.]. titled "SmartDisk New FirePower Drive Applies FireWire 800 Mbit/ps" published on Businesswire, was pulled at the request of Businesswire and was only available for a few minutes.

What can be gleaned from the fragments of the PR summary is that these are "a new line of high performance desktop hard drives that connect to Apple's computers using 800Mb/ps FireWire".

The premature release suggests that Apple will intro 800Mb/ps FireWire ports on at least some of its Macs during CEO Jobs' keynote Tuesday.

It is unclear why Businesswire would request the item be pulled from Yahoo biz unless the call came from Apple. As far as IGM is aware, Apple still has a shareholding in SmartDisk.

There is no indication of the release on SmartDisk's home page.

SmartDisk will be at Booth 1142 at MacWorld from tomorrow.

Analysis: This was obviously unintentionally sent out early, but tends to confirm that Apple will intro faster FireWire tomorrow. This will give IEEE-1394 an even bigger leg up on USB 2.0 which itself struggles to live up to its advertised '480Mb/ps' speed. 800Mb/ps controllers and devices have reportedly been manufactured in Taiwan since around October, but their utility without the controllers on Macs and PCI cards to drive sales was dubious. Now watch the rush to FireWire 2.0