I need to buy some additional external hard drives to archive movies (video TS files). Will there be a benefit in using Firewire 800 vs. 400 when watching Video TS files through Apple DVD player? Is it worth the additional expense?
Thanks

For watching? None. For transferring to and from the drive? Yes a bit. It depends on how much money we are talking though to be honest. If the price is way out of line I would just go bigger with the 400, if it is only a few bucks then I might consider the 800. The only reason I say that is the drives we buy today may be put to other uses in the future, Timemachine comes to mind.

Jerry is right on the money with his advice: FW800 won't help one bit with Apple dvd player, hell, dog slow USB is fine for that, and usually 800 isn't worth the price premium with typical home theater tasks.

Of course, you have to have a Mac with a FW800 port to take advantage of it, and thanks to Apple's distinction between consumer and pro features, and its willingness to cripple expansion and upgrade possibilities, most home theater Macs do not.

That said, I love FW800 for external storage, we have 3 Macs in the house with it and when your Macs are wired up with gigabit, and if you tend to move things around--not play them, but move them from volume to volume, or copy whole volumes to another volume--it is very easy to get spoiled. Gigabit and FW800 are fast. If you upgrade to Leopard, have several Macs, plan to use the screen sharing and share Mac features a lot, 800 can still be advantageous for a good while longer.

You know yourself best--are you a little impatient? do you tend to leave recordings and ripped dvds where they are, or move them around and reorganize?

I've had a 4 drive enclosure with two independent FW800 bridges (Oxford chipsets) for a few years and love it connected to a PowerMac, and I back up both my wife's main computer and my main computer (both Powerbooks) onto fast 2.5" SATA drives in bus powered enclosures that have the Oxford 924 chipset--which has USB, 400 and 800. These things fly over 800.

This way, if anything ever happened to our main Macs, we could boot other Macs off the enclosures and be up and running no problem. When we travel, we just need to bring one laptop and take the enclosures with us.

The bigger picture problem now is Apple kept lower end Macs crippled--it took forever for their darling iMac to get a FW800 port, the Macbook and Mini forgetaboutit--so you have to question the merits of investing in 800 now that firewire is essentially dead, that Apple has been slow embracing eSATA and with USB3 is coming down the pike.

Jerry's read between the lines advice is also savvy: regardless of the enclosure you buy now--perhaps the better investment is in a bigger drive that can be used longer and repurposed down the road. Drives that are less full are speedier and more efficient. If I had to buy at this point--I'd probably spend a higher % of my money getting the biggest fastest drives I could, and stick to basic Oxford FW400. Daisychained firewire 400 devices are perfectly fine home theater-wise--there's very little advantage to 800 or the fixed RAID 0/RAID 1 options you see in a lot of enclosures these days.

You don't mention which enclosures you are looking at, or which Mac you're going to hook them up to. Or if you have a budget figure. For me, it comes down to a simple question: "will I ever consider using these enclosures for something other than playing DVDs or music?" If the answer is no, then FW400 will be fine, and you needn't worry about getting a more expensive drive, either.

But if you may use these enclosures for something else, then pop the extra $'s for FW 800 (and maybe eSATA, if you have a tower Mac that you can pop a pci eSATA card in, or if Apple decides to add an eSATA port in a future Mac you may buy).

Many enclosures come with a variety of interfaces, with only about $10-20 difference between upgrades. So a FW 800 enclosure should only cost you about $10-30 more than a FW 400 case. And as chefklc mentions, the Oxford 924 is king of the hill for a triple or quad interface. You can't go wrong getting an enclosure with that for a bridge. Robust, versatile, and future proof.