when i asked my apple tech guy about the price difference between usb drives and firewire drives he noted as best as i understood that it's something to do about the power supply

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must be a chip (which if it is thats a bad design) , all drives take the same voltages, 12 & 5 for desktops, 5 for laptops

also the shell is specially designed/manufactured in a firewire drive to dissipate the heat

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yea that sounds like apple, drives could run abit hotter in an enclosure, but not enough to cause apple to hire nasa engineers to come up with a mega super special heat dissipating ceramic enclosure grown in space

course in non perfect PC land the same drives are usually stacked like bricks multiplying each others heat, and almost every single case design has them stuffed behind a ball of power supply wires (mainly mobo) and ribbon cables ... with sata this got abit better in regards to airflow