Recently I bought a smoking fast external SSD enclosures from Other World Computing. My plan was to use the FireWire 800 connection to the drive so I can get the best portable speed possible. Alas, on all my machines as soon as I tried to do anything on the drive, Windows 7 hangs completely. That’s not good nor was the option of using that pokey USB 2 connection as that wouldn’t take advantage of the SSD drive.
Before I sent the drive back, I did some hard web searching and found I was not alone in people complaining about the Windows 7 FireWire drivers. Many people reported hangs, but none seemed to have a solution. Fortunately, John Zhu came to the rescue on the Tech Net Forums. Microsoft rewrote the IEEE 1394 (FireWire) driver for Windows 7 and let’s just say it doesn’t seem to work that well.
John pointed out that you could go into the Device Manager and change the driver to the 1394 Legacy driver. That’s worked great for me! It’s great to see those much faster speeds than USB 2. See John’s discussion for the exact steps to change the driver.