Bare Feats have a new review on FireWire RAID storage solutions:

Three new FireWire RAID storage products got my attention: The Miglia MediaBank, Wiebetech RAID, and Granite Digital FireVue Hot-Swap RAID system. The idea is to put two drives in one box to create a compact, all-in-one dual drive striped or mirrored RAID. Being a speed guy, the striped RAID 0 results are posted herein.

One key distinction about the Wiebetech RAID is that it is bundled with a fast FireWire PCI card. Why do you need a FireWire card if you already have built-in FireWire? Because to get the fastest transfer rates with a FireWire RAID pair, you have to have two channels. Not two ports. Two channels, or controllers, if you will. Adding a FireWire PCI card to built-in FireWire, in effect, creates a second channel. You'll see in the charts below what a difference that makes. (PowerBooks can do the same thing by using a CardBus FireWire card in addition to the built-in FireWire.)

I understand that Miglia will be offering a dual channel FireWire PCI card in November as an option to buyers of the MediaBank. Can't wait to test that one. Granite Digital already offers a FireWire PCI card as an option (haven't tried it, yet). For this round of testing, I used Wiebetech's FireWire card to create a second channel on all three test units.

All three systems used IBM 120GXP drives. And just for "fun," I threw in the test results for a three drive RAID using three FireWire channels.