Firewire Drive

The term "Firewire" is Apple Inc.'s designation for the engineering standard "IEEE-1394," included in all Macintosh computers from the late 1990s onward, and known in Sony consumer camcorders as iLink. It refers to an interface that connects external devices to a computer.

Firewire drives are magnetic hard disc drives installed in a portable enclosure with a firewire interface. Firewire drives became popular in post production due to their small footprint relative to large drive capacity, simple cabling options, and their ability to handle the bandwidth of processing audio/video files. While the data integrity of a magnetic hard drive is very stable, if properly handled and stored, they are not recommended for long term storage, as they rely on the mechanics of spinning platters and moving magnetic heads to actually access the data.